Gabriela Gesualdo

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Geosciences

Climate change affects the global water cycle and has the potential to alter water availability for food-energy-water production, and for ecosystems services, on regional and local scales. An understanding these effects is crucial to assessing future water availability, and for the development of sustainable management plans. Here, we investigate t...

Water crises have risen over the past decade. In the Brazilian context, extreme events have been intensified over the country undermining water systems in regions that already face water shortages. Although existing studies focused on individual regions of Brazil, an overview of the entire country will contribute to developing a national action pla...

Similar to most countries, the Brazilian water resources management considers topographically delineated catchment as a territorial unit for policy implementation. Yet, previous studies have shown that catchments are not hydrologically isolated, and topographic limits often neglect the groundwater boundaries. Thus, studies on effective catchment ar...

General Circulation and Earth System Models are the most advanced tools for investigating climate responses to future scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions, playing the role of projecting the climate throughout the century. Nevertheless, climate projections are model-dependent and may show systematic biases, requiring a bias correction for any furt...

This paper shares an Early-Career Scientist (ECS) perspective on potential themes for the upcoming International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) scientific decade (SD). Six discussion sessions were organised in four countries in western Europe in spring 2022. Early-career hydrologists were invited to join the sessions to formulate poten...

Drought management strategies have primarily focused on structural measures, which are insufficient to prevent water supply disruptions and economic losses. In this concept, adaptation entails anticipating the negative financial consequences of extreme weather events and taking appropriate measures to prevent and mitigate them. As a result, insuran...

Ensuring food security against climate risks has been a growing challenge recently. Weather index insurance has been pointed out as a tool for increasing the financial resilience of food production. However, the multi-hazard insurance design needs to be better understood. This paper aims to review weather index insurance design for food security re...

This paper shares an early-career perspective on potential themes for the upcoming International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) scientific decade (SD). This opinion paper synthesizes six discussion sessions in western Europe identifying three themes that all offer a different perspective on the hydrological threats the world faces and...

The urgency of accelerating disaster risk resilience also promotes preferred systematic reviews of the methods for design and evaluation of risk transfer tools. This paper aims to provide a state-of-art weather index insurance design, thereby including methods for natural hazards’ indices calculation, vulnerability assessment and risk pricing. We a...

Brazil is seen as a potential world breadbasket in which an increase of around 40% in its current production is expected by the year 2050 to attend food demand imposed by world population growth. The disorderly intensification of agriculture results in erosion, losses and exhaustion of soil nutrients, abandonment of the area, and opening of new agr...

A better understanding of climate change impacts on water security beyond climate variability is of critical importance to tackle water vulnerabilities exacerbated by increasing extreme weather events. Thus, studies on water security in a changing climate help decision-makers to overcome existing political and socioeconomic challenges worldwide. In...

The increase in water demand and droughts have exacerbated water inequalities and weakened the economy worldwide. Nonetheless, droughts alone do not justify the severity of water scarcity events, leading to public water rationing and restrictions. It is of paramount importance to obtain a better understanding of how public perceptions of and attitu...

Water is a critical resource for food production. Climate change has shown that shifts in precipitation regimes and increases in atmospheric temperature threaten food production worldwide. Therefore, it plays an essential role as a driver in the water-environment-food nexus. Strategies to cope with impacts of climate risk require understanding the...

The increase in extreme climate events due to climate change has resulted in crop losses, quality losses, environmental and social impacts in agricultural areas. Insurance against extreme events is a vital tool adaptation to deal with the impacts of those hazards. However, few works consider the optimization of different dimensions related to this...

Providing accurate rainfall estimation at limited coverage areas is challenging, especially when considering the lack of weather stations’ maintenance and the existence of missing or incorrect data. Another source of uncertainty related to in situ stations is the need to extrapolate the measures for spatial applications. The Inverse Distance Weight...

One significant impact of climate change in agricultural areas is the increase in frequency and potential impacts of droughts. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is an important meteorological drought index. It is commonly used as a proxy for agricultural drought. However, this use ignores the complex plant, soil, and atmosphere interaction...

Water security considers the availability of water in quantity and quality for human activities and ecosystem functioning, within an environment that is resilient to natural threats. The preparation for extreme events within human activities can be measured by the concepts of WTP (Willigness-To-Pay), WTA (Willigness-To-Accept) or WTAdapt (Willignes...

The concept of water security considers the availability of water in sufficient quantity and quality for human activities and ecosystem maintenance in a resilient, stable politic and peaceful climate. The cooperation and interaction between human activities and ecosystems has not been clearly understood, which undermines the resilience of society a...

Similar to most countries, the Brazilian water resources management considers topographically delineated catchment as a territorial unit for policy implementation. Yet, previous studies have shown that catchments are not hydrologically isolated, and topographic limits often neglect the groundwater boundaries. Thus, studies on effective catchment ar...

In the last decades, we have witnessed increasing losses on crop yield due to an increase in magnitude and frequency of hydrological extremes such as droughts and floods. These hazards promote systematic and regressive impacts on the economy and human behavior. Risk transfer mechanisms are key to cope with the economic impacts of these events, ther...

Extreme weather events are increasingly evident and widespread around the world due to climate change. These events are driven by rising temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns, which lead to changes in flood frequency, drought and water availability. To reduce the future impacts of natural disasters, it is crucial to understand the spat...

Climate change affects the global water cycle and has the potential to alter water availability for food–energy–water production, and for ecosystems services, on regional and local scales. An understanding of these effects is crucial for assessing future water availability, and for the development of sustainable management plans. Here, we investiga...

Excess sediment is one of the main agents of water pollution, affects the aquatic ecosystem and causes siltation problems in reservoirs and rivers. Bottom sediments are coarse and easily deposited, being the major responsible for morphological alterations in rivers. Therefore, is important to estimate the amount of sediment transported in other to...

Water erosion triggers the spending of billions of dollars a year to Brazil, as well as social and environmental issues. One of the strategies to minimise soil erosion and to foster economic development is adopting techniques for the integration of agricultural systems. Nevertheless, studies on long-term experimental fields under integrated systems...

Climate change affects the global water cycle and has the potential to alter water availability for food-energy-water production and the ecosystems services on regional and local scales. In southeastern Brazil, the Cantareira Water Supply System reached unprecedented low levels in January 2015 compromising the water supply for the Metropolitan Regi...

Brazil is one of the richest countries in water resources and is currently the second largest global supplier of food and agricultural products. Furthermore, more than 70% of Brazilian energy comes from hydropower. Therefore, to ensure water availability for future generations it is necessary to consider the Nexus thinking (water, food, energy, eco...

We assess whether a Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programme met its objectives of reducing soil ero-sion and yielding water in an environmental protected area, the Guariroba River Basin, Midwestern Brazil. Wemeasured rainfall and water discharge throughout 2012 and 2016. During the same period, soil and water con-servation practices were pe...

Poster presented at the academic integration event of The Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul

Poster presented at the GRSS Young Professionals & ISPRS Student Consortium Summer School 2018

Achieving a balance between water availability and demand is one of the most pressing environmental challenges in the twenty-first century. This challenge is exacerbated by, climate change, which has already affected the water balance of landscapes globally by intensifying runoff, reducing snowpacks, and shifting precipitation regimes. Understandin...