Adaptation of Dams and Reservoirs to Climate Change and Environmental Flows

Dams and Reservoirs (D&R) are vulnerable to climate hazards; thus, they need to be adapted to climate change.In this adaptation procedure D&R systems are broken into components, the impacts of the climate hazards on each component are determined, the vulnerable components whose risks are high are identified, and adaptation measures are proposed to reduce these risks.One of the most important components of D&R systems is the environmental flow (E-FLOW).In the literature, there exist more than 200 methods for assessing E-FLOW that can be categorized as hydrological, hydrodynamic habitat modelling (HHM), and holistic methods combining the first two methods.In this work the HHM method is presented using indicative examples and the effects of climate change on E-FLOW are briefly discussed.