The European Alps are an important water source, because many rivers originate from this area. The water is required for multiple uses, and the demand for water is particularly high in summer since more water is needed for irrigation and cooling. The high water demand in this season is currently met by runoff regimes, which have their peaks in summer due to the melting of snow and glaciers. As a result of climate change, these two natural water stores are expected to decrease in the future, because of glacier retreat and a reduction in winter snow cover. It is therefore predicted that the Alpine runoff regimes will increase in winter and spring but decrease in summer and fall, while the total runoff volume is expected to remain relatively stable. This temporal mismatch between seasonal water availability and demand may lead to seasonal and local water shortages. If droughts become more severe and occur more frequently under climate change, water shortage could become more significant.
One potential strategy for mitigating the projected changes in seasonal water availability is to manage runoff through multi-purpose reservoirs. Such reservoirs can be operated in order to provide multiple services, including hydropower production, water supply, flood and drought management, irrigation supply, environmental services, and recreational activities. The coordination of multiple resource uses of such reservoirs in order to guarantee the coexistence of competing resource claims, however, entails challenges in the governance processes. The objective of my PhD thesis was therefore to increase the understanding of the challenges in the governance processes to coordinate competing resource uses of multi-purpose reservoirs in order to support policy practice in overcoming them.
Location in the Bernese Oberland, Switzerland, for the proposed Trift hydropower reservoir (Photo: Elke Kellner)
The results show that the biophysical conditions have changed over recent decades due to climate change, as did the socio-economic conditions, and that the institutional resource regime has become increasingly incoherent. The co-evolution of polycentric processes to govern the competing resource uses of hydropower production and environmental and landscape issues compensated for regime incoherence. Polycentric governance improved the coordination of these resource uses through mutual adjustment, trust, and overarching goals between actors with similar and opposing interests. However, the downstream water deficit – which could theoretically be covered through upstream water supply from a new reservoir – was not taken into account in the governance process. Coordination with the downstream water uses was impeded by (1) a lack of knowledge, awareness, and available data about future downstream water shortages; (2) a strong interest in phasing out nuclear energy and increasing renewable energy production; (3) a focus on reaching consensus on environmental issues with the non-governmental organisations in the participatory process; and (4) strong economic interests in hydropower production.
The thesis concludes that multi-purpose reservoirs could be a promising solution for the alleviation of summer water shortage if the governance processes were to be improved by (a) considering the impacts of incoherent policies, such as national subsidies, on decision-making, (b) adapting the level and spatial scale of the processes to that of the affected catchment and integrating affected downstream actors in decision-making, (c) providing sufficient neutral information on the biophysical conditions at relevant scale for current and future drought scenarios and analysing management options for multi-purpose reservoirs, and (d) examining synergies and trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation strategies when addressing a reservoir’s potential contribution. The thesis closes with policy recommendations to improve the overall coherence of the institutional resource regime in force, since the results confirm that incoherent regulations are one of the most critical obstacles to coordinating competing resource claims.
Own publications
Kellner, Elke; Brunner, Manuela I. (2021): Reservoir governance in world’s water towers needs to anticipate multi-purpose use. In Earth’s Future 9, e2020EF001643. DOI: 10.1029/2020EF001643.
Kellner, Elke (2020): Mehrzweckspeicher zur Minderung von Wasserknappheit im Sommer. In: Emmanuel Reynard ; Dubois, Alan ; Borgeat Theler, Muriel (Eds.): Le Rhône. Territoire, ressource et culture: Cahiers de Vallesia. Sion (33rd ed., 177-184).
Kellner, Elke; Oberlack, Christoph; Gerber, Jean-David (2019): Polycentric governance compensates for incoherence of resource regimes: The case of water uses under climate change in Oberhasli, Switzerland. In: Environmental Science & Policy 100, pp. 126–135. DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2019.06.008.
Kellner, Elke (2019): Social acceptance of a multi-purpose reservoir in a recently deglaciated landscape in the Swiss Alps. In: Sustainability 11 (14), p. 3819. DOI: 10.3390/su11143819.
Kellner, Elke (2019): Soziale Akzeptanz der Talsperre Trift in den Schweizer Alpen. In: Wasserwirtschaft 109 (5), pp. 26–29. DOI: 10.1007/s35147-019-0033-7.
Kellner, Elke; Weingartner, Rolf (2018): Chancen und Herausforderungen von Mehrzweckspeichern als Anpassung an den Klimawandel. In: Wasser Energie Luft 110 (2), pp. 101–107.