Characterising and quantifying water demands in mountain tourist resorts

CALIANNO, MARTIN; REYNARD, EMMANUEL

Prague

Conferencia; 26th General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG), Prague, 2015; 2015

IUGG

In the context of integrated water resources (and uses) management studies, this work focuses on the monitoring of water demands in mountain tourist resorts. Three issues are addressed, right at the interface between human and water systems: 1) The complexity of water use systems in highly developed mountainous areas, characterised by inadequate distribution of resources and demands over both space (water demand concentration, remote from resources) and time (higher demands during winter, the low flow period). This has lead to the development of heavy hydraulic infrastructures (interbasin transfers; storage reservoirs; networks for artificial snowmaking, drinking water supply, irrigation and hydropower production). Moreover, there are significant tourism-related demand pressures. In this work, spatial and temporal scale issues are addressed from a conceptual (concepts of water use system and water use regime) and cartographic (using GIS) perspective.2) The need for continuous and long-term water use data. There is a strong contrast between water resources, which are almost systematically monitored, and water demands for which direct measurements are rare and insufficient. To address this lack of data, we set up an observatory of water demands in two Alpine resorts for two major uses: drinking water (in Megève, France and Montana, Switzerland) and irrigation (Montana).3) The need to better understand water demand drivers, belonging to the socio-economical sphere and the water cycle state. Proxies commonly used for the estimation of water demand (e.g. needs per capita) are here compared with our direct measurements.