Balancing Energy, Irrigation, and Environmental Demands in the Zambezi Watercourse: Operations and Sequencing of New Dams

The competition for water, energy, and food is intensifying, and this is happening at a time when society is increasingly aware of the environmental trade-offs involved in building more dams.

The EI lab led a study in collaboration with Delft University of Technology published in Earth’s Future in which a new optimization framework has been described to highlight how environmental flow and irrigation deficits were far more responsive to modifications in operational policy than changes in water availability.

In this post published in Global Water Forum, Wyatt Arnold, Andrea Castelletti and Matteo Giuliani discuss the discovery which emphasizes the crucial role of operational policies in enhancing dam planning and river basins where dams already exist or are being proposed. 

The study resulted from two European Union Horizon 2020 Programme research projects, DAFNE and GoNEXUS.  

Read more here: Arnold W., Salazar J.Z., Carlino A., Giuliani M., Casteletti A. (2023). Operations eclipse sequencing in multipurpose dam planning, Earth’s Future, 11(4), e2022EF003186, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF003186