Climate resilience | Resolving to be resilient
Learning from case studies, addressing concerns over lake drought, and embracing integrated management can all help to increase the climate resilience of hydro projects worldwide.
Above: Wivenhoe Dam in Queensland, Australia became the focal point of global attention in 2011 due to its ‘suboptimal flood control operation’
Below: Lake Como in Italy is a natural reservoir which is described as being a challenge to manage
RESEARCH HAS SHOWN WITH increasing confidence that as global surface-level temperatures continue to rise, precipitation and streamflow extremes will intensify. And this is why the World Bank has recently been looking at enhancing the safety and resilience of dams in the cntext of climate change and extreme hydrological events, providing detailed methodologies of climate change impact assessment, along with case studies on adaptative reservoir operation from different regions.
Learning from Australia After assessing the impact of climate change on PMP
estimates, Australian researchers have identified the assumption of a stationary climate as a key shortcoming of traditional estimates. Indeed, based on an optimistic climate scenario, PMP estimates across Australia are predicted to increase by an average of 13% by 2100, compared with 33% for the pessimistic scenario. PMP methods,
the team says, will require regular updating to account for likely progressive increases in PMP and ensuing flood estimates. Such PMP projections indicate serious implications for the hydrological safety of dams under climate change impacts in Australia, while the same range of impacts can be expected for many other regions of the world. It was Queensland’s Wivenhoe Dam on the Brisbane River which caught global attention back in 2011 when, what has been described as ‘suboptimal flood control operation’, caused severe flooding. Tragically, 33 people died, flood damages amounted to A$3.2bn across 90 towns, and more than 20,000 homes were flooded when greater priority was given to storing water for water supply than releasing it for flood control. As one of the most advanced countries regarding dam safety in the world, with a low number of recorded dam failures and incidents, the World Bank report says this is why the event became so well studied for learning purposes. Primarily operated as a water supply dam for the Brisbane and Ipswich regions by Seqwater, Wivenhoe Dam also provides for flood mitigation control, hydropower generation, and recreation. A 59m high rock and earthfill embankment with a total storage capacity of about 3.1 billion m3
, construction was
completed in 1984. Bringing a historic class action to court over the management of the Wivenhoe Dam, a group of nearly 7000 local flood victims won their case in 2019, with a judge finding that they were ‘victims of negligence’. The New South Wales Supreme Court then ruled that the dam’s flood engineers relied too closely on “rain on the ground” estimates in 2011 while not appropriately using forecast rainfall for the Wivenhoe Dam’s catchment area. The World bank report says this case highlights the importance of establishing a proper decision support system and operation manual for multipurpose dam operations, which inherently include conflicting demands for water supply and flood control. The introduction of advanced rainfall and inflow forecasting systems is equally important for supporting the decision support systems for reservoir operation.
36 | January 2026 |
www.waterpowermagazine.com
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