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Ensuring food security against climate risks has been a growing challenge recently. Weather index insurance has been pointed out as a tool for increasing the financial resilience of food production. However, the multi-hazard insurance design needs to be better understood. This paper aims to review weather index insurance design for food security resilience, including the methodology for calculating natural hazards' indices, vulnerability assessment, and risk pricing. We searched for relevant research papers in the Scopus database using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol. Initially, 364 peer-reviewed papers from 1 January 2010 to 19 February 2022 were screened for bibliometric analysis. Then, the 26 most relevant papers from the last 5 years were systematically analyzed. Our results demonstrate that despite a significant research effort on index insurance, most papers focused on food production. However, research considering other aspects of food security, such as transportation, storage, and distribution, is lacking. Most research focuses on droughts. Other hazards, such as extreme temperature variation, excessive rainfall, and wildfires, were poorly covered. Most studies considered only single-hazard risk, and the multi-hazard risk studies assumed independence between hazards, neglecting the synergy hypothesis between hazards. Lastly, we proposed a conceptual framework that illustrates design paths for a generalized weather index insurance design and evaluation. Solutions for addressing multi-hazard problems are considered. An illustrative example demonstrates the importance of testing the multi-hazard risk hypothesis for weather-based index insurance design for soybean production in Brazil.

As the global economy expands, increasing losses of natural capital translate into substantially higher costs and inefficiencies in achieving future water security. Risk transfer is one risk management tools used to protect regions particularly vulnerable to the effects of extreme events that affect water availability. Index insurance has been investigated as a potential solution for dealing with drought events that lead to water scarcity in the water supply sector. Nonetheless, water scarcity can result not only from drought but also from the degradation of quality. Floods also have an impact on water supply, resulting in economic losses for the supply sector. Water supply services are under threat from a variety of hazards intensified by extremes of climate variability and climate change and socioeconomic factors. This work aims to discuss index insurance adaptation to cover financial losses incurred by water utility companies as a result of a variety of extreme hydrological events and uncertainty drivers, bringing opportunities to improve index insurance application to the sector. Given the complex vulnerability to different hazards related to the quantity and quality of raw water, in addition to the drivers of uncertainty affecting water availability, improved risk transfer model application is still required to incorporate such multiple risks and uncertainties. Many gaps and limitations in the design and implementation of water infrastructure insurance remain, including improved characterization of the relationship between droughts, floods, and pollution extremes and their implications in financial losses for supply; and the development of damage quantification methodologies, among other issues.

In Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries, Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) options have accelerated “education for preparedness” initiatives for 100 million people living at >90,000 water-risk prone areas. Before and during COVID pandemic, innovative T-shaped (“breadth-and-depth”) labs of open science have promoted education towards the Agenda 2030. Here we depict actions delivered by the Water-Adaptive Design & Innovation lab (@TheWADILab) to provide citizen science with inclusiveness (CC+), as a learning accelerator of human-water coevolution under change (i.e. ‘Panta Rhei Open Science for Future Earth’, PROSFE). We summarize CC+PROSFE examples of practical learning with a blend of options at the DRR Center for Education and Research on Disasters (CEPED, www.ceped.eesc.usp.br) through: open access to data and tools, new mechanisms, hybrid curation platforms, competency-skill curricula, and blended education. First, examples have been applied during >1,200 hours of lectures of hydrology to >600 students, ranging from “puzzling 3D transboundary aquifer” for undergraduate students (Fig 1) to competency learning (skills, fundamentals, attitudes) of blended education for professionals (Fig 2). Second, CC+PROSFE aims to: (1) mobilize international cooperation to improve knowledge and innovation to address water security challenges at “Panta Rhei Schools", i.e. welcoming visiting scientists to the School of Advanced Studies in Water & Society Under Change (SASW≻ http://www1.eesc.usp.br/ppgshs/internacionalizacao), (2) strengthen science-policy interface to reach water security at local-to-global levels through the new UNESCO Chair in Urban Waters and the new WMO-Americas Regional Climate Centre hosted by Prohimet (https://www.prohimet.org/), (3) pave new pathways for water security knowledge to empower and activate citizenry at the local level using the Socio-Hydrological Observatory for Water Security (SHOWS), cycles of #OneDropOfScience #OneDoseOfResilience and Academia-Community’s Waters for Our World! Project (https://prg.usp.br/academia-comunidade-wow-waters-for-our-world/), and (4) develop institutional and human capacities for water security, sustainability and inspiration through water literacy and communication in the joint initiative of UNESCO-IHP-LAC & Pechakucha (https://www.pechakucha.com/events/agua-todavia-unesco-x-pechakucha).

Water is a critical resource for food production. Climate change has shown that shifts in precipitation regimes and increases in atmospheric temperature threaten food production worldwide. Therefore, it plays an essential role as a driver in the water-environment-food nexus. Strategies to cope with impacts of climate risk require understanding the relationship between hydro-meteorological extremes and crop yield shortfalls to guide decision-making. The purpose of this paper is to propose a fully data-driven model for predicting the impacts of hydrological extremes on food production for decision-making at the municipal level. We use the Support Vector Machine (SVM) model considering a variety of kernels for predicting crop yields using reanalysis data of water storage (WS) from 0 to 28 cm of soil during the soybean growing season. We used ERA5 WS data for Paraná state in Brazil and official annual soybean crop yields (SBY) at the municipal level. We tuned a SVM radial basis function kernel with sigma and cost parameters for municipalities with significant production of soybean. The SVM model predicted crop yields accurately with R² ranging from 0.12 to 0.85. The use of soil moisture data increased model accuracy from 30 to 95% and reduced error from 5 to 58% in relation to using only SBY, except for one location. These results indicate that the model is better able to depict SBY during drier conditions, reducing prediction accuracy in years with average or above average yields. The model we proposed is useful for estimating crop losses due to water shortage at the municipal level. Our results suggest that using WS data from ERA5 as an additional input to past SBY adds relevant information for several applications such as risk transfer, irrigation planning and farm-level management with data that are made available for most countries. Our model has potential for climate impact studies coupled with projections from Global Circulation Models forced by Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SPP).

Climate change affects the global water cycle and has the potential to alter water availability for food–energy–water production, and for ecosystems services, on regional and local scales. An understanding of these effects is crucial for assessing future water availability, and for the development of sustainable management plans. Here, we investigate the influence of anticipated climate change on water security in the Jaguari Basin, which is the main source of freshwater for 9 million people in the São Paulo metropolitan region (SPMR). First, we calibrate and evaluate a hydrological model using daily observed data, obtaining satisfactory coefficient of determination and Kling–Gupta efficiency values for both periods. To represent possible climate change scenarios up to 2095, we consider two International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) and use an ensemble of future projections generated by 17 general circulation models (GCMs). These data were used to drive the hydrological model to generate projected scenarios of streamflow. We then used indicators of water scarcity and vulnerability to carry out a quantitative analysis of provision probability. Our results indicate that streamflow can be expected to exhibit increased interannual variability, significant increases in flow rate between January and March, and a 2-month extension of the hydrological dry season (currently June to September) until November. The latter includes a more than a 35 % reduction in streamflow during September through November (with a > 50 % reduction in October). Our findings indicate an increased risk of floods and droughts accompanied by an expansion of the basin critical period, and our analysis of the water security indices identifies October and November as the most vulnerable months. Overall, our analysis exposes the fragility of water security in the São Paulo metropolitan region, and provides valuable technical and scientific information that can be used to guide regional plans and strategies to cope with potential future water scarcity.

Made available in DSpace on 2022-04-29T08:41:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2022-03-01 Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) Similar to most countries, the Brazilian water resources management considers topographically delineated catchment as a territorial unit for policy implementation. Yet, previous studies have shown that catchments are not hydrologically isolated, and topographic limits often neglect the groundwater boundaries. Thus, studies on effective catchment areas are promising for shedding light on inter-catchment groundwater flow. Here, we investigated the deviation between the topographic and effective areas across Brazil. We applied the effective catchment area index (ECI) to 733 Brazilian catchments and identified the most influencing attributes on the ECI by using principal component and random forest analyses (PCA and RFA, respectively). Further analysis was carried out by contrasting the ECI values against the expected range of the Budyko curve, considering both topographic and effective catchment areas (classic and adjusted framework, respectively). We noted that nearly 32% of the Brazilian catchments presented more than 30% of difference between the effective area and its topographic boundaries. In general, the more arid biomes in Brazil—the Cerrado and Caatinga—are prone to have smaller effective areas while larger effective areas were mostly found in the Atlantic Forest biome, a humid tropical region with a higher mean elevation. Our findings indicate that the aridity index was the main driving factor and negatively correlated with ECI followed by mean slope, precipitation seasonality, and mean elevation. We highlight the potential of adopting a pooling of catchments based on their interconnectivity to minimize management costs while maximizing synergies and lessening trade-offs between ecosystem functioning and water transfer processes. Our results contribute to a better country-wide understanding of hydrological connectivity among catchments and highlight the need to consider the effective catchment area to overcome water-food-energy security challenges on multiple scales. Department of Hydraulics and Sanitation São Carlos School of Engineering University of São Paulo, SP Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Bauru Engineering College São Paulo State University – UNESP, SP Faculty of Engineering Architecture and Urbanism and Geography Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, MS Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Bauru Engineering College São Paulo State University – UNESP, SP CAPES: 001 FAPESP: 2015/03806-1 FAPESP: 2019/24292-7 FAPESP: 2021/14016-2 CNPq: 309752/2020-5 CNPq: 441289/2017-7

All land uses provide ecosystem services (ES), which have been depleted due to the lack of soil conservation practices along with the intensive use of land for meeting the water-energy-food nexus demand. The economic incentive is a first step towards attracting farmers’ interest in protecting and conserving ES. Farmers, stakeholders, and decision-makers need to understand the value and importance of watershed services through a straightforward cost-effective analysis of conserving and/or protecting them. Economic feasibility affects the volunteer enrolment in payment for ecosystem services (PES) programmes for adopting soil conservation practices in rural areas; nonetheless, it is still poorly understood regarding investments in ES restoration and preservation. There is very little information on the restoration of water provisioning in rural basins that participated in PES programmes. Additionally, most studies focus on programmes for one specific type of landowner, putting aside the plurality of landowners in the basin. It undermines PES programmes implementation when assessing individual preferences and willingness to pay. Thus, we aim to compare costs and benefits from incentivising soil conservation practices and forest restoration in a rural basin through a cost-benefit analysis and quantitative improvements of water provision and soil erosion control; moreover, we will use hydrological and economic-decision models to asses the uncertainties from the relationship between soil conservation practices and watershed services under climate change. The Guariroba River Basin (36,200 ha), located on the rural side of Campo Grande city ‒ Brazil, currently provides 34% of the drinking water demand in the urban area — once provided about 50% — since converting native Cerrado vegetation of the basin for cattle farming has led to a decrease in water provisioning due to soil degradation and, consequently, reservoir siltation. In 2009, the city hall launched a PES Programme called ‘Manancial Vivo’ (MVP). In this context, it is fundamental to understand how uncertainties in the input data, economic models structure, and parameters estimation are consistently integrated into hydro-economic models. By this, we will assess different hydro-economic scenarios of water availability to understand uncertainties and hydrological trade-offs. We expect to respond to some questions: whether the Brazilian PES programme model is environmentally and economically adequate; how water-food-energy insecurity nexus affects PES policies; and what role PES plays in building resilience to water supply systems and helping people to adapt to climate change effects.

We assess whether a Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programme met its objectives of reducing soil erosion and yielding water in an environmental protected area, the Guariroba River Basin, Midwestern Brazil. We measured rainfall and water discharge throughout 2012 and 2016. During the same period, soil and water conservation practices were performed in the basin, such as: building level terraces and riparian vegetation recovery. We separated streamflow into baseflow and direct runoff, then we evaluted the baseflow index that indicated that groundwater significantly contributes to total flow. Therefore, to investigate the effects on streamflow, we performed a trend analysis in the baseflow time series using the Mann-Kendall test. In addition, we analysed the efficiency of soil erosion regulation practices over time, considering the total payment and the trends found in the baseflow. Whereas precipitation records present a decreasing trend (1 mm month−1), baseflow tends to increase by 0.018 m3 s−1 in the same period. Our findings show that soil conservation practices performed in the basin increase baseflow and also provide a better resilience to endure extreme events such as drought based on an increase in forest areas and soil conservation practices such as level terrace.