A fully-integrated hydrological-optimization framework for Water–Energy–Food nexus management in alpine basins

Water–Energy–Food (WEF) nexus management in regulated alpine basins requires integrated approaches that couple hydrological modeling with multi-objective optimization. Reservoir operations must balance multiple competing objectives (e.g., hydropower production, downstream water demand) under highly variable hydrological conditions. Climate change is further intensifying these trade-offs by altering runoff seasonality and increasing hydrological uncertainty. Fully-coupled modeling frameworks are needed to directly represent the feedback between hydrological processes, reservoir operations, and management objectives, enabling efficient exploration of optimal operating strategies.

This study presents a fully-integrated framework that couples the distributed hydrological model HYPERstreamHS with the Borg Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (Borg-MOEA). The full integration allows the optimization algorithm to directly evaluate joint hydrological responses and management outcomes for different reservoir operating strategies within each iteration, capturing process feedbacks while reducing computational overhead compared to external coupling schemes.

We apply this framework to the Adda River basin in the Italian Alps, a highly regulated hydropower system. Results demonstrate how the coupled approach efficiently identifies Pareto-optimal trade-offs between energy production and competing water management objectives under climate uncertainty, providing quantitative support for adaptive reservoir operations.

Overall, this work provides a transferable modeling framework for multi-objective WEF nexus management in regulated alpine basins.