Potential hydropower contribution to mitigate climate risk and build resilience in Africa
Ana Lucía Cáceres (),
Paulina Jaramillo,
H. Scott Matthews,
Constantine Samaras and
Bart Nijssen
Additional contact information
Ana Lucía Cáceres: Carnegie Mellon University
Paulina Jaramillo: Carnegie Mellon University
H. Scott Matthews: Carnegie Mellon University
Constantine Samaras: Carnegie Mellon University
Bart Nijssen: University of Washington
Nature Climate Change, 2022, vol. 12, issue 8, 719-727
Abstract:
Abstract Hydropower will play an essential role in meeting the growing energy needs in Africa but will be affected by climate change. We assess future annual usable capacity and variability of supply for 87 existing hydropower plants in Africa on the basis of a multimodel ensemble of 21 global climate models and two emissions scenarios (representative concentration pathways RCP 4.5 and 8.5). We estimate near-future, mid-century and end-of-the-century impacts and assess the potential for connections within and across power pools to reduce changes in usable capacity and variability. We evaluate the potential synergies between hydropower, wind and solar resources in each power pool. We find that regional interconnection could mitigate some of the climate impacts on hydropower. Furthermore, variable renewable energy, especially solar power, could potentially compensate for usable hydropower capacity losses. Our work contributes to a better understanding of the climate-induced impacts on hydropower resources in Africa and potential risk mitigation opportunities.
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01413-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:12:y:2022:i:8:d:10.1038_s41558-022-01413-6
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/
DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01413-6
Access Statistics for this article
Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake
More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().