A blueprint for adapting high Aswan dam operation in Egypt to challenges of filling and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam

摘要

Many river basins world-wide are experiencing increasing pressure on water resources, due to accelerated economic growth, rising population, increasing food demand, and climate change (Wada and Bierkens, 2014; Munia et al., 2016). Such challenges are more evident in transboundary basins, e.g., the Nile basin (Paisley and Henshaw, 2013; Rahman, 2013), Euphrates-Tigris (Kibaroglu and Gürsoy, 2015), or the Mekong basin (Grumbine and Xu, 2011). These rivers are under intense development pressure, with multiple upstream dams planned or under construction that would dramatically alter a wide range of hydrological, agricultural, and ecological systems. In addition to dam development, climate variability is a significant factor when assessing water system sustainability (V?r?smarty et al., 2000; Kummu et al., 2014). The growing regional and global concerns about these adverse impacts of large-scale dam construction and climate variability have led to increasing interests to revisit the operation of existing dams (Grumbine et al., 2012; Digna et al., 2018).