Efectos del cambio climático en el recurso hídrico de los países andinos

Latin America is characterized by a highly available, large amount of water resources. This fact, combined with an abrupt topography allows the creation of important hydropower stations with relatively small structures, what has fostered this kind of infrastructures. Recently, however, some worries have started to appear related to the effects that climate change may have on hydropower stations, and how these effects may change the spatial distribution of energy generation in the region. In this work, we present a methodology and the main results obtained in the study Climate change vulnerability and adaptation measures of hydropower stations in Andean countries that has studied the hydropower systems of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The main focus of this work is on the regional analysis of the water resources, a previous step to the analysis of the evolution of hydropower resources, where homogeneous databases of hydroclimatic variables have been generated for the whole study area, making use of spatio-temporal reconstruction through Kriging. Land use and soil type information has also been homogenized for the whole study area. Hydrology has been resolved with the semi distributed hydrologic model VIC. We have analyzed the historic period 1980-2010 and have generated climate change projections for the short term (2011-2040), the medium term (2041-2070) and the long term (2071-2100) for scenarios RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 of the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC. We have also considered the socio-economic evolution and its impact on land use.