Integrating local and global projections for the generation of water demand scenarios in the Red River Basin, Vietnam

Planning and management of water supply systems require projections to account for future changes in climate and society. Global and local future scenarios are generated by using models at different spatial scales. The choice of the scale affects if and how the regional socio-economic structure as well as global and local development strategies are considered, and which uncertainties are treated explicitly. This study explores the integration of global and local scale scenarios. Our approach is demonstrated on the Red River basin, Vietnam, where a set of plausible water demands scenarios is generated for 2050. Results show that water demand will increase by 28-58% compared to 2010 when considering all scenarios of climate and socio-economic changes. The ensemble of integrated demands shows a strong dependence of water demand upon the climate-socio-economic state, which allow a better characterization of the future water supply sector dynamics than those obtained by global or local projections only.Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors.This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)