Adaptation strategies to climate change and climate variability: A comparative study between seven contrasting river basins

Adaptation strategies to climate change and climate variability to enhance food quantity and security and environmental quality and security have been explored for seven contrasting basins in the context of the ADAPT project. For the seven basins as much as possible established modeling frameworks were used, where the focus was on the linkage between field scale models to explore farm scale water management and basin scale models dealing with water resources issues. Climate change projections were scaled to local conditions where the HadCM3 and the ECHAM4 General Circulation Models as well as the seven basins required different adjustment factors in this downscaling. For the seven basins selected, impacts and adaptation strategies at field scale indicated that overall food production will increase in the future as a result of enhanced CO