Quantifying future water demand in the Rhine river basin under climate and socioeconomic change

The Rhine river basin has increasingly faced severe summer droughts, resulting in critically low water availability for different water users. Rising temperatures combined with reduced precipitation have also intensified irrigation areas during summer (Purnamasari et al., 2025a). Concurrently, land use and land cover changes, population growth, and economic development are likely to reshape future water consumption patterns. These climatic and socioeconomic drivers present major challenges for sustainable water resources management in the Rhine basin. To address this, we developed a methodology to quantify future water demand in the Rhine basin by integrating climate projections from the KNMI’23 scenarios with socioeconomic development pathways. The socioeconomic development pathways are build upon previous work by Purnamasari et al. (2025b).Our approach combines projected changes in climate variables with land use and land cover dynamics, population growth, and economic trends to estimate evolving water use patterns across different sectors. By linking spatially explicit water demand scenarios with a distributed hydrological model, we capture spatiotemporal changes in hydrological processes under multiple plausible futures. The results highlight potential future hotspots of water deficit, supporting informed decision-making on water allocation, drought mitigation, and long-term water resources planning in the Rhine basin under climate and socioeconomic change. The approach is readily transferable to other European river basins and beyond. This work is part of the ongoing Horizon Europe project Stars4Water.

Purnamasari, D., Teuling, A. J., and Weerts, A. H.: Identifying irrigated areas using land surface temperature and hydrological modelling: Application to Rhine basin, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-1483-2025, 2025.

Purnamasari, D., van Verseveld, W. J., Buitink, J., Sperna Weiland, F. C., Dalmijn, B., Teuling, R., and Weerts, A. H.: Improving realism of high-resolution hydrological modeling with anthropogenic water use: A study on the Rhine Basin, ESS Open Archive, 2025.