1. © 2011 Martin Beniston Linking the physical, biological, and socio-economic sciences: an example from the EU « ACQWA » Project Martin Beniston Institute for Environmental Sciences University of Geneva, Switzerland and coordinator of EU-FP7 project « ACQWA » Martin.Beniston@unige.ch ICES Meeting, January 7, 2011

2. © 2011 Martin Beniston Mountains as a source of more than half the world’s rivers

3. © 2011 Martin Beniston Upstream-downstream links

4. © 2011 Martin Beniston The Rhone River catchment 95,000 km 2 ; 16 million inhabitants Swiss segment: 10,100 km 2 1.2 million inhabitants Climate Glaciers Snow Vegetation Environmental Controls Tourism Energy Agriculture Economic Controls Runoff Extremes Geomorphic

5. © 2011 Martin Beniston Assessing Climate impacts on the Quantity and quality of WAter n 37 academic partners in Europe + Chile, Argentina, Kyrgyzstan n As for many EU projects, the project is designed to help guide future European environmental and climate policy n It will also provide updated information for the European Water Framework Directive n www.acqwa.ch

6. © 2011 Martin Beniston Overview of ACQWA AdaptationGovernance POLICY TourismAgricultureEnergy IMPACTS Extremes Climate Ice/GlacierSnowBiosphere Hydrology MODELS ChileKyrgyzstan CASE- STUDIES An analogy today for the Alps of tomorrow? Possible opportunities during the 21st Century?

7. © 2011 Martin Beniston Rivalries between economic sectors? Climatic change Water resources TourismAgricultureMining Conflict mitigation through improved water governance? Energy

8. © 2011 Martin Beniston What added value from ICES? n Integrated earth-system model as opposed to a separate set of climate component models n Higher spatial and temporal definition n Larger domain (possibly global to ensure a seamless simulations, thus avoiding additional problems of boundary conditions inherent to coupled modeling approaches) n More convincing visual approaches to convince decision makers?

9. © 2011 Martin Beniston 2000 Such visualization is more explicit than pages of text…! Courtesy: Max Maisch University of Zurich, Switzerland 2050? +3°C?

10. © 2011 Martin Beniston Possible 1-day ICES Workshop in Geneva: April 15, 2011 n PART 1: n Overview papers to give a flavor of the "big topics" and emerging domains requiring HPC++, e.g., u Cosmology and solar science u Climate Sciences u Tectonics u Space-borne observation technologies n PART 2: n Bridging the disciplines: integrating complex, multi- dimensional science u From « hard science » to decision making, what are the options to convince the stakeholders, policy-makers, the general public, etc., that science is providing sound results?