The role of multi-sector climate impacts in achieving water, energy, and land SDGs

Several studies have explored the interaction across the water, energy, and land (WEL) systems under the scope of policy analysis, highlighting the importance and usefulness of integrated approaches in exploring pathways for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the WEL sectors. However, most of these studies neglect the possible impact of climate change on the natural system (e.g. water cycle and crop yields changes) or on technologies (e.g. power plant potentials, desalination, etc.) because of the high complexity, interconnection and uncertainty of these impacts.
Using the latest version of the MESSAGEix-GLOBIOM Integrated Assessment Model (IAM), we study the long-term resources, supply and demand of the energy, water and land sectors to determine the regional and sectoral investments required for achieving the SDGs. Here we show the implications of climate feedbacks for different regions and sectors under different climate mitigation scenarios. The largest component of climate impacts, and the highest source of uncertainty, are changes in water availability, which affect irrigation, provision of basic water and sanitation access, hydropower potential and the available technology options for cooling power plants.