Hedging as an adaptive measure for climate change induced water shortage at the Pong reservoir in the Indus Basin Beas River, India

This study investigated the adaptive capacity of static and dynamic hedging operating policies to shore up the performance, i.e. reliability and vulnerability, in irrigation water supply of Pong reservoir in India, during climate change. The policies were developed using genetic algorithm optimisation and used to force reservoir simulations for different climate change perturbed inflow series, whence derive the performance. For static hedging, the hedging fraction remains constant throughout the year while for dynamic hedging, this fraction varies monthly or seasonally. Results showed that static hedging was effective at tempering the systems vulnerability from its high of ≥60% to lower than 25%, while maintaining an acceptable volume-based reliability. Further simulations with dynamic hedging provided only modest improvements in these two indices. The significance of this study is its demonstration of the effectiveness of hedging as a climate change adaptation measure by limiting water shortage impacts. It also demonstrates that simple static hedging can match more complex dynamic hedging policies.