From a white paper to an adventure gamebook: engaging practitioners in climate change impact studies on hydrology

Scientific methodological guides are usually rather boring. However, numerous methodological challenges and pitfalls can be encountered in carrying out a climate change impact study on hydrology, and there is an urgent need to transfer data and related expertise from scientists to practitioners. This communication presents a hopefully less boring white paper written in the style of an adventure gamebook (see Jackson & Livingstone, 1982). This book is tailored for French water managers and consultants in hydrology, taking into account their specific language, datasets, and institutional context. It gathers good practice and up-to-date knowledge from scientists, and real-life experience of studies designed by local water managers and conducted by consultants within the EU LIFE Eau&Climat project (2021-2024).

The book starts with the traditional warnings to the reader which is then invited to define her quest given the evolving context of the catchment of interest, and to prepare her equipment, gathering existing reports/adventurers’ accounts, collecting data/parchment maps, and listing available models/forest pathways. The core of the book is organized around two missions, the first of which consists in recovering the past evolution of water resources, through analyzing trends and potentially implement hydrological models. The second mission aims at composing the future of water resources in the catchment, through understanding and making use of possible climate and hydrology futures, through exploring the latest national climate and hydrology services and associated web portals to future worlds (see Kirk and Sangster, 2023, notably Part 4: “Portals and Worlds”). This book should serve as a basis for the reader to then develop robust adaptation strategies, in order for her to neither drown in a future flooding nor seeing her vital harvest compromised by recurring severe droughts.

This book is designed in R markdown with the bookdown package (Xie, 2023). This work is funded by the EU LIFE Eau&Climat project (LIFE19 GIC/FR/001259).

Jackson S. & Livingstone, I. (1982) The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Puffin, Harmondsworth. 170 p. ISBN 978-978-0-14-031538-7

Kirk T. & Sangster M. (2023) Realms of Imagination. Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy. British Library, London. 271 p. ISBN 978-978-0-7123-5449-3

Xie Y. (2023) bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. R package version 0.37, https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown