Abstract
The production of electricity from hydropower is exclusively determined by the availability of water. Upstream water use such as irrigation and drinking water supply, down-stream constraints and climate change are just some of the factors that can pose a risk to the hy-dropower producer. The relationships between these factors can in many river basins be very complex, introducing large uncertainties to future revenues. Tools to analyze the wider under-standing of the hydrological risks in river basins with multiple and geographically distributed water uses have to a limited extent been applied in the long-term planning of hydropower pro-jects. The use of such tools will reduce the financial risk of a project, as well as providing a ba-sis for a dialogue between stakeholders. We have reviewed a set of different tools/approaches to assess the hydrological risks of hydropower projects, which include; i) hydrological models with functions to run scenarios with climate change and different allocation and priorities be-tween sectors, ii) integration of model simulation and expert judgement using Bayesian network methodology and iii) other risk assessment approaches, including the decision-tree framework, as proposed by the World Bank
