Water security in arid and semi-arid Middle Eastern climates has been severely impacted by effects of climate change such as reduced precipitation, diminished storage, increased evapotranspiration, and prolonged heat waves. These climate effects are compounded in Iraq, where populations, agriculture, industry, and energy rely heavily on varying transboundary water flows to meet water demands. Iraq’s most profitable sector, energy, is especially threatened by insufficient water supply, which complicates government decision making in energy infrastructure development.
This work develops a scenario-based multi-criteria analysis framework to prioritize infrastructure investments in the context of climate change and scarcity of natural resources. Infrastructure facilities are evaluated against social, economic, climate, and hydrologic criteria across a set of disruptive climatological, economic, and social scenarios to identify robust initiatives and the most and least disruptive scenarios to the system. A particular innovation is the evaluation of hydrology data derived from satellites in determining water scarcity impact on individual energy facilities. The methods are demonstrated for a critical sector of Iraq’s economy: oil and natural gas. The results include an identification of the most disruptive scenarios to energy sector priorities and scenario-based system orderings to guide stakeholders in investment prioritization.
