Climate change and extreme events will affect the hydrological cycle resulting in substantial impacts on many sectors of water resources systems including water availability, agriculture and water quality. The water stress is particularly high especially in developing countries, such as Brazil, India, and South Africa, which are three of the country partners in BRICS. In these countries climate change exerts even more challenges to water resources management. Hence, the aim of the proposed multilateral research is to assess the impact of climate change and extremes on quantitative and qualitative aspects of water resources in selected watershedsof different physiographic and agro-climatic regions among three of the BRICS countries and to develop an integrated water management model as an adaptation approach to cope with the climate change. 

Research is divided into five modules. Module 1 involves the creation and compilation of hydro-climatological and geospatial databases for each of the selected watersheds of Brazil, India and South Africa. Module 2 is the analysis of long term climate change anomalies and climate extremes which cause droughts and floods.Module 3 is the assessment of climate change impacts on quantitative and qualitative aspects of water resources in the selected watersheds using the hydrological models. Module 4 is the evaluation of different adaptation strategies of water resources management including assessing responses to climate change and extremes through several iterations of calibration, sensitivity analysis and validation. In this 4th module an integrated water management model will be developed based on the proposed adaptation strategies. Module 5 is the collation of all the climate databases, analysis methods, and integrated water management model into a common geospatial and computational framework. All the major results of the research implementation strategies and policy recommendations will be prepared as a “green paper” for each of the three countries and these could be used at different spheres of governance as sustainable development tools.