SMAT Project: Climate Change and Groundwater
The impacts of climate change expose people, societies, economic sectors, and ecosystems to risks arising from the interaction between hazard, vulnerability, and exposure. Within an increasingly preventative and proactive vision of integrated water management, the ability to adapt to climate change is one of the most important challenges facing the near future.
The vulnerability of water resources to climate change affects both qualitative and quantitative water availability, the management of drinking water demand, and infrastructure systems as a whole. It is therefore necessary to address the issue of water resources' response to climate change in the broadest possible sense, identifying new criteria for the design of sewerage and distribution infrastructure, for water purification and purification treatments, as well as diversifying supply sources and improving their management.
SMAT (Società Metropolitana Acque Torino SpA) ensures the provision of the Integrated Water Service in a geographically diverse area, and the supply sources used today are already multiple and diverse. Groundwater resources (wells and springs) account for approximately 80% of SMAT's total supply by volume. Understanding groundwater's response to climate change and its interaction with surface water is therefore a priority.
This research program aims to assess, at the scale of the territory served by SMAT (ATO3 Turin), and over a ten- to twenty-year time horizon, the vulnerability to climate change of groundwater resources used for drinking purposes and their interaction with surface water. This vulnerability is understood both in quantitative terms, i.e., the future availability of water resources, and in qualitative terms, i.e., the maintenance of the water's physical and chemical characteristics.
The final results of this project, which will be based on a probabilistic forecast and may consequently lead to the delineation of various possible policy scenarios, will provide the initial basis for future guidelines and strategic developments, both for infrastructure and supply decisions.