Abstract

Based on international statistics and projections, population spread, energy demand, water consumption, will impose new challenges and constraints. The impact of climate change will modify the current rainfall patron completely in Latin America (LATAM) altering the availability of water resource. On the other hand, hydroelectricity represents near 55% of the electricity production in LATAM and near 70% of freshwater withdrawals are used for agricultural purposes. Agriculture in the region is a key activity that supports important social welfare in many countries, especially to more vulnerable rural sectors. Under this scenario, Water, Land and Energy (WLE) resource competition become intense and poses challenges to the decision makers, considering global impacts and the fact that agriculture is an intensive user of those resources. The relevance of the WLE nexus is widely recognized but current tools for an integrated analysis are not covering the complexity of the problem. Models for decision-making are mostly from a top-down perspective, in which smaller scale variables are invisible or oversimplified. This work is about new macro tools that enable to make an integrated approach to modelling WLE at LATAM level, protecting agriculture and guarantee energy security according to clean and renewable energy. The strategy to face this issue from a regional perspective responds to the techno-economical possibility of the electric interconnection among countries to increase system strength and receive benefits from the resource complementarity. Some variables to be discussed are: use of water for irrigation and livestock, and food security. We concluded this work with a new analysis framework proposed and applied to LATAM region using a centralized planning tool. The co-optimization between energy and water is analyzed for the year 2040 using a centralized operation approach. Several scenarios and sensitivities show the impact of considering climate change, water use and social variables of the rural sector.