FutureWater has started a new assignment for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) examining how climate change will affect Armenia’s existing and planned reservoirs. The work feeds into ADB’s “Glacier to Farms” investment programme.

Armenia depends on its 87 existing dams and a pipeline of planned reservoirs for irrigation (80% of crop water), hydropower (>30% of energy), and drinking-water supply. National projections show river flow declining by roughly 14% by 2040 and up to 39% by the end of the century, putting this storage system under increasing pressure. FutureWater is assessing climate risk across the country’s six primary river basins using the SPHY hydrological model together with ERA5 and NASA-NEX climate datasets.

A central focus is seasonality. Reservoir operation depends not on annual totals but on when water arrives, and warming is shifting Armenia’s snowmelt earlier in the year while reducing late-summer baseflow. Capturing these seasonal changes is critical for reservoir filling schedules, irrigation timing, and the design of new storage.

A key output is a prioritisation of reservoirs — ranking existing and planned dams by climate vulnerability, refill reliability, and adaptation potential — to indicate where Armenia and its development partners should focus investment first. The findings will inform ADB’s lending pipeline and Armenia’s long-term water resources planning, in close consultation with Armenia’s Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure, and Ministry of Economy.

More information about the project can be found here.