Person: Ray, Patrick Alexander
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Patrick specializes in increasing the resilience of water systems to climate variability and change through the use of advanced climate science and hydrologic forecasting, in combination with innovative water resources management techniques and methods for decision making under uncertainty. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, the World Bank, Army Corps of Engineers, and California Department of Water Resources, among others. He has experience managing multidimensional risk assessments for water projects worldwide, and has served as an expert consultant for the World Bank Group, the United Nations Development Program, the World Food Program, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Because of his role in the development of the World Bank’s Decision Tree for Confronting Climate Uncertainty, he shared in the World Bank’s 2015 Knowbel Prize for “Understanding the Impact of Climate Change and Other Risks on Hydropower.”
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Publication Confronting Climate Uncertainty in Water Resources Planning and Project Design: The Decision Tree Framework(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015-08-25) Brown, Casey M.; Ray, Patrick A.The Decision Tree Framework described in this book provides resource-limited project planners and program managers with a cost-effective and effort-efficient, scientifically defensible, repeatable, and clear method for demonstrating the robustness of a project to climate change. At the conclusion of this process, the project planner will be empowered to confidently communicate the method by which the vulnerabilities of the project have been assessed, and how the adjustments that were made (if any were necessary) improved the project’s feasibility and profitability. The framework adopts a “bottom-up” approach to risk assessment that aims at a thorough understanding of a project’s vulnerabilities to climate change in the context of other nonclimate uncertainties (for example, economic, environmental, demographic, or political). It helps to identify projects that perform well across a wide range of potential future climate conditions, as opposed to seeking solutions that are optimal in expected conditions but fragile to conditions deviating from the expected.Publication Multidimensional Stress Test for Hydropower Investments Facing Climate, Geophysical and Financial Uncertainty(Elsevier, 2018-01) Ray, Patrick A.; Wi, Sungwook; Yang, Yi-Chen E.; Karki, Pravin; Garcia, Luis E.; Rodriguez, Diego J.; Brown, Casey M.Investors, developers, policy makers and engineers are rightly concerned about the potential effects of climate change on the future performance of hydropower investments. Hydroelectricity offers potentially low greenhouse-gas emission, renewable energy and reliable energy storage. However, hydroelectricity developments are large, complicated projects and possibly critically vulnerable to changes in climate and other assumptions related to future uncertainties. This paper presents a general assessment approach for evaluating the resilience of hydroelectricity projects to uncertainty in climate and other risk factors (e.g., financial, natural hazard). The process uses a decision analytic framework based on a decision scaling approach, which combines scenario neutral analysis and vulnerability-specific probability assessment. The technical evaluation process involves identification of project objectives, specification of uncertain factors, multi-dimensional sensitivity analysis, and data mining to identify vulnerability-specific scenarios and vulnerability-specific estimations of risk. The process is demonstrated with an application to a proposed hydropower facility on the Arun River in Nepal. The findings of the case study illustrate an example in which climate change is not the critical future uncertainty, and consequently highlight the importance of considering multiple uncertainties in combination.Publication The Future Nexus of the Brahmaputra River Basin: Climate, Water, Energy and Food Trajectories(Elsevier, 2016-03) Yang, Y.C. Ethan; Wi, Sungwook; Ray, Patrick A.; Brown, Casey M.; Khalil, Abedalrazq F.Advance knowledge of conflicting trajectories of water–energy–food (WEF) nexus is highly relevant for water policy and planning, especially for basins that cross national boundaries. The Brahmaputra River Basin in South Asia, home for 130 million people, is such a basin. Development of new hydropower projects, upstream water diversions and possible climate changes introduce concerns among riparian countries about future water supply for energy and food production in the basin. This study presents a new hydro-economic water system model of the basin coupled with ex post scenario analysis under the “nexus thinking” concept to identify and illustrate where development paths are in conflict. Results indicate that the ability of future development to remain free of conflict hinges mostly on the amount of precipitation falling in the basin in the future. Uncertain future precipitation along with uncertain future temperature and the unknown amount of upstream water diversion combine to strongly influence future water, energy and food production in the basin. Specifically, decreases in precipitation coupled with large upstream diversions (e.g., diversion in the territory of China) would leave one or more riparian countries unable to secure enough water to produce their desired energy and food. Future climate projected by General Circulation Models suggest a warmer and wetter climate condition in the region, which is associated with an increase in streamflow and easing of conflicts at the WEF nexus in the basin. The methodology presented here is expected to be generally useful for diagnosing the conditions that may cause water resources development goals to not be achieved due to either changes in climate or water use among competing users.Publication Room for Improvement: Hydroclimatic Challenges to Poverty-Reducing Development of the Brahmaputra River Basin(Elsevier, 2015-12) Yang, Yi-Chen E.; Ray, Patrick A.; Wi, Sungwook; Khalil, Abedalrazq; Chatikavanij, Vansa; Brown, CaseyThe Brahmaputra river is the largest (by annual discharge) of the three in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) system, and by itself carries more flow than all but 4 rivers in the world. It is the primary water source for over 130 million people, many of whom are mired in chronic poverty. The potential in the Brahmaputra River basin for poverty-reducing development of agriculture and hydropower is great. However, progress in these sectors and others has been hindered by significant natural and anthropogenic challenges. As they attempt to develop their water resources in a manner that reduces water-related vulnerabilities, the people of the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, Bhutan, Northeast India, and Bangladesh face a number of challenges, including: endemic poverty; floods; droughts; groundwater over-abstraction; political unrest; and the broader development ambitions of the member nations (leading to net import or export of resources from the basin). To those challenges have recently been added climate change and difficult decisions regarding hydropower development. A critical compounding factor in the Brahmaputra basin is the lack of an authoritative, reliable, and comprehensive network of basin-wide information on climate, streamflow, natural hazards, and economic factors, such as agricultural production, prices, and trade. Anthropocentric development in the Brahmaputra basin must balance the goal of immediate poverty reduction with the preservation of the vulnerable, rich natural heritage of the basin, in the interest both of intergenerational human equity, and biocentric egalitarianism. In the space allotted here, we provide a snapshot of the demographic and hydroclimatic characteristics of the basin of greatest concern to water system planners aiming at poverty reduction through sustainable development. We propose that the basin's hydro-climatological, economic, and political complexities are such that a basin-wide water system knowledge platform is needed to organize quantitative thinking on potential water-related investments in the basin.Publication Beyond Downscaling : A Bottom-Up Approach to Climate Adaptation for Water Resources Management(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-09-11) Garcia, L.E.; Matthews, J.H.; Rodriguez, D.J.; Wijnen, M.; DiFrancesco, K.N.; Ray, P.This report focuses on how we achieve water sustainability over long timescales - decades, even centuries from now. These timescales are important and relevant to our decisions about planning, infrastructure, and institutions today. Many of the methods we use to manage water, directly or indirectly, commit us to future decision pathways and restrict us from making other, alternative decisions. Across the first four chapters, this report describes the challenges of including climate change in water management decision-making and provides an overview of current practices in the adaptation field. After considering the pros and cons of these practices, the book concludes with a framework for an adaptation approach supported by Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA).