WHAT-IF Water, Hydropower, Agriculture Tool for Investment and Financing v1.0 is an open source decision support tool distributed under the GPLv3 license and is described in the HESS publication:
WHAT-IF: an open-source decision support tool for water infrastructure investment planning within the Water-Energy-Food-Climate Nexus
WHAT IS WHAT-IF
The novelty of the tool is that it combines a hydro-economic optimization framework, with a nexus representation of the agriculture and food systems. The tool can represent political boundaries, the joint development of water-energy-food infrastructure and policies, and uncertainty in future climate and socio-technical changes. It aims to provide quantitative answers to the following prototypical questions:
-What is the economic impact of a given set of projects? Which is the best alternative among different investment plans?
-What are the synergies or trade-offs between investments and/or policies in different sectors? (e.g. what are the trade-offs between hydropower, irrigation development plans and ecosystem preservation)
-What are the risks linked to uncertainty in future climate and socio-economic changes? Which investments and policies will be more robust to a range of future conditions?
WHO IS WHAT-IF
WHAT-IF is developed by COWI A/S, the Technical University of Denmark and the Massachusetts Institute of technology. As an open-source framework anyone can use what-if and collaborate