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Summary Policymakers in arid and semiarid basins face hard choices on water policies needed for adaptation to climate change. Hydro-economic modeling is a state-of-the art approach that can be used to guide the design and implementation of these policies in basins. A major gap in developments of hydro-economic modeling to date has been the weak integration of physically-based representations of water sources and uses such as the interaction between ground and surface water resources, to inform complex basin scale policy choices. This paper presents an integrated hydro-economic modeling framework to address this gap with application to an important and complex river basin in Spain, the Jucar basin, for the assessment of a range of climate change scenarios and policy choices. Results indicate that in absence of adequate policies protecting water resources and natural ecosystems, water users will strategically deplete reservoirs, aquifers and river flows for short-term adaptation to climate change, disregarding the impacts on the environment and future human activities. These impacts can be addressed by implementing sustainable management policies. However, these policies could have disproportionate costs for some stakeholders groups, and their opposition may undermine attempts at sustainable policy. These tradeoffs among water policy choices are important guides to the design of policies aimed at basin-wide adaptation to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary An increase in water demands, exacerbated by climate change and the tightening of environmental requirements, leads to a reduction in available water resources for economic uses. This situation poses challenges for water resource planning and management. Water accounting has emerged as an appropriate tool to improve transparency and control in water management. There are multiple water accounting approaches, but they generally involve a very exhaustive list of accounted concepts. According to our findings in this research, one of the best water accounting methodologies is the Australian Water Accounting Standard. However, its implementation for integrated water resource planning and management purposes calls into questioning the amount of information and level of detail necessary for the users of water accounts. In this paper, we present a different method of applying the Australian Water Accounting Standard in relation to water resource management, which improves its utility. In order to compare the original approach and that proposed here, we present and discuss an application to the Júcar Water Resource System, in eastern Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]