Browsing by Author "Vicuña, Sebastián"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    A GIS-based urban and peri-urban landscape representation toolbox for hydrological distributed modeling
    (2017) Sanzana Cuevas, Pedro Pablo; Gironás León, Jorge Alfredo; Brand, I.; Branger, F.; Rodríguez, F.; Vargas, X.; Hitschfeld, N.; Muñoz Pardo, José Francisco; Vicuña, Sebastián; Mejía, A.; Jankowski, S.; CEDEUS (Chile)
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    Assessing tradeoffs in the design of climate change adaptation strategies for water utilities in Chile
    (2022) Ricalde, Iñigo; Vicuña, Sebastián; Melo Contreras, Óscar; Tomlinson, James E.; Harou, Julien J.; Characklis, Greg
    Climate change is a challenge to drinking water providers worldwide and to regulatory frameworks that consider long-term investment decisions. Coping with an unstable climate warrants adjustments in regulations and new investments. The investment required to maintain a selected service level needs to balance the potential for high regret stranded assets with the political and socioeconomic consequences of not meeting water demands. In recent years, the City of Santiago in Chile has seen drought events associated with climate change, which could worsen in the future. Chile’s drinking water regulatory framework does not account for uncertainty in infrastructure design to cope with the potential impacts of such events. This work presents an adaptation option design process that considers multiple plausible climate change-impacted future scenarios, ccommodating both structural and nonstructural measures. In our Santiago case study adaptation measures include extensions to the existing Chilean water market and traditional structural alternatives (e.g., storage infrastructure); all are represented in a simulation model of the water utility. We evaluate and optimize packages of efficient adaptation measures for various climate scenarios. This allows comparing different portfolios of combined institutional and infrastructure interventions via a range of stakeholder measures and comparing their tradeoffs under different plausible climate-impacted hydrological scenarios. Results showed that water supply performance without climate change adaptation is worse under climate scenarios with lower water availability, which are likely to be associated with higher GHG emission scenarios such as RCP 8.5. The optimized portfolios implement various combinations of adaptation strategies to reduce the impacts of this poor performance. Considering the uncertainty on future climate scenarios, the use of nonstructural adaptation measures such as option contracts exhibits the advantage of providing water in critical periods while avoiding large investments such as building reservoirs or the purchase of permanent water rights, which could end up underused if favorable climate scenarios manifest.
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    Compensating Water Service Interruptions to Implement a Safe-to-Fail Approach to Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Water Supply
    (2020) Undurraga, Rafael; Vicuña, Sebastián; Melo Contreras, Óscar
    A city resilient to climate change is characterized by effectively responding to and recovering from the negative impacts of climate hazards. In the city of Santiago, Chile, extreme weather that can be associated with a nascent manifestation of climate change has caused high-turbidity events, repeatedly forcing the main water company to interrupt the supply of drinking water, affecting millions of people. This study proposes a transformative response to reduce harm from extreme events due to climate change. The traditional approach of increasing resilience through large infrastructure works can be complemented by one-off reductions in water use during emergencies, in exchange for economic compensation. This alternative seeks to transfer the individual responsibility of water companies to a collective one, where the community is an active agent that reduces damage in the face of extreme events resulting from climate change. In the assessment of this response, we used a choice experiment to estimate the minimum amount users are willing to accept in compensation for water service interruptions. The results show that willingness to accept compensation is significant (close to 0.6 USD/hour) and decreases when users have experienced additional unplanned interruptions. The aggregate cost of the compensation is lower than infrastructure investments required to avoid service interruptions under various future hypothetical hydroclimatic scenarios associated with climate change impacts. Therefore, compensation-based instruments for water service interruptions could be a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to infrastructure-based measures to cope with future climate hazards.
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    Desalinización: oportunidades y desafíos para abordar la inseguridad hídrica en chile
    (Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología, Conocimiento e Innovación, 2022) Vicuña, Sebastián; Daniele, Linda; Farías, Laura; González, Humberto; Marquet, Pablo A.; Palma Behnke, Rodrigo; Stehr, Alejandra; Urquiza, Anahí; Wagemann, Elizabeth; Arenas Herrera, María J.; Bórquez, Rodrigo; Cornejo Ponce, Lorena; Delgado, Verónica; Etcheberry, Gabriel; Fragkou, María Christina; Fuster, Rodrigo; Gelcich, Stefan; Melo, Óscar; Monsalve, Tamara; Olivares, Marcelo; Ramajo, Laura; Ramírez Pascualli, Carlos; Rojas, Carolina; Rojas, Christian; Vilca Salinas, Patricia; Winckler, Patricio; Winckler, Patricio; Lambert, Fabrice
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    Exploring possible connections between hydrological extreme events and climate change in central south Chile
    (2013) Vicuña, Sebastián; Gironás León, Jorge Alfredo; Meza, Francisco Javier; Cruzat, M.; Bustos Bahamonde, Eduardo; Poblete López, David Nicolás; Bambach Ortiz, Nicolás Eduardo
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    Flexible Instruments to Address Water Security in the Context of Climate Uncertainty: A Case Study of Option Contracts in a Chilean River Basin
    (ASCE-AMER SOC CIVIL ENGINEERS, 2025) Ávila, Antonia; Vicuña, Sebastián; Gironás, Jorge; Melo, Oscar; Rivera, Daniela; Molinos, María
    Climate change is causing widespread extreme weather events around the world, affecting food and water security. One example is Chile, which is facing the longest drought in its history. To cope with this situation, adaptation measures such as option contracts have been explored. This type of contract allows the temporary transfer of water from one user to another, depending on weather conditions, with monetary compensation for the users who give up the water. Using the Aconcagua River basin as a case study, it was possible to evaluate the effectiveness of these contracts to mitigate the impact of drought on human consumption in a context of climatic uncertainty. The results indicate that the contract is activated between 0 and 49 times depending on the scenario and that the water supply of the water utility is increased. In conclusion, it is found that option contracts allow mitigating future water scarcity, reducing unsatisfied demand, and improving the water security of the affected populations.
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    Towards a Drought Monitoring, Tracking, and Management Platform Based on Quantitative Indices
    (2025) Gironás, Jorge; Núñez, Marialina; Vicuña, Sebastián; Aedo, Sebastián; Morales, David; Vargas, Javier; Guzmán, Juan de Dios; Suárez, Francisco
    Drought is a complex phenomenon that affects the development and use of the country’s water resources. Characterization through indices is critical in planning, management, and decision-making to mitigate the effects of drought, mainly when these are implemented in online platforms for monitoring, warning, and tracking the phenomenon. These tools serve as a basis for implementing a set of measures focused on the short, medium, and long term, oriented to different audiences, and with differentiation of procedures and entities involved depending on the case. This work proposes the technical basis for elaborating preventive drought monitoring in Chile through a visualization platform. Based on a comparative analysis of international tools and the results of a consultation with experts, the relevant characteristics of a system for drought monitoring, follow-up, and management based on standardized drought indexes are analyzed. It is concluded that such a platform should consider multiple drought indices with different levels of severity for their classification. These indices should be automatically calculated using as much information as possible, both from national and international sources, from in-situ gauges as well as from satellite and remote sensing products, and even obtained from modeling. On the other hand, the visualization should be simple, straightforward, and flexible, and the information delivered should provide information on the manifestation of drought in the territory and its short-term forecast.
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    Using a Gridded Global Dataset to Characterize Regional Hydroclimate in Central Chile
    (2013) Demaría, E. M. C.; Maurer, E.; Sheffield, J.; Bustos, E.; Poblete López, David Nicolás; Vicuña, Sebastián; Meza, Francisco Javier