MODEL-BASED ANALYSIS OF IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND MITIGATION ON HYDROPOWER

Abstract

 To investigate the impacts of climate change and mitigation policies on future hydropower generation, we analyzed the global theoretical hydropower potential (THP) data calculated by the global hydrological model H08 and the hydropower generation (HG) data calculated by the Asia-Pacific Integrated Model/Computable General Equilibrium (AIM/CGE) model. The results implied that climate change would moderately increase the global total THP and socioeconomic change would substantially increase global total HG. Stringent mitigation policy would further increase HG. The increase rate of THP is much smaller than that of HG. There are large variations of increase or decrease in THP across regions, climate change scenarios and periods. The quantified influence demonstrated the significance of coupling H08 and AIM/CGE.