Rural water infrastructure in Georgia is being designed against a shifting climate baseline: heavier multi-day rainfall is destabilizing mountain slopes in the Greater Caucasus, longer dry spells are stressing irrigated agriculture in the south and east, heatwave days are rising sharply from a low historical baseline, and Black Sea sea-level rise threatens low-lying coastal settlements. ADB's settlement-level climate design checklist (as part of Georgia's Water RBL programme) requires that each targeted rural settlement is screened against current and future climate hazards before design is finalized, but no single off-the-shelf dataset gives a settlement engineer the full picture at the province scale.
The project delivers a complete, decision-ready climate-hazard reference for each of Georgia’s ten provinces (the nine mkhare plus the Adjara Autonomous Republic). Specifically, it (i) compiles a consistent climate-trend signal across eight indicators per province under the CMIP6 high-emissions scenario, (ii) translates gridded hazard datasets and global hazard rating databases into a comparable Low–Severe severity scale for six hazards per province across three time horizons (current, 2050, 2090), and (iii) packages these into A4 poster-style profiles ready for inclusion in ADB programme reporting and provincial design workshops.
FutureWater built a reproducible pipeline that brings together three layers of evidence: long-term climate projections, gridded hazard data, and current-day hazard ratings supplemented by Georgia-tuned sea-level rise for the coastal provinces. A hybrid severity strategy selects the most defensible source per hazard, using gridded data where available and expert-calibrated uplift rules on future climate indicators where not. The output for each province is a single one-page profile combining maps, indicator trend charts, and hazard matrices across three time horizons.
With these profiles, ADB and the Government of Georgia’s water-sector counterparts will be able to prioritize settlement-level climate adaptation measures across all ten provinces against a shared, citable evidence base, defend infrastructure-design choices against a transparent severity rating, and re-run the pipeline as updated climate projections and improved gridded hazard layers become available. The same approach can be reused as a template for settlement-level climate screening elsewhere in ADB’s regional water portfolio.
