From Centralized to Decentralized Resilience: Projected Climate Impacts on Mozambique's Energy-Water Nexus and a Framework for Adaptation

Mozambique's energy security, heavily reliant on climate-vulnerable hydropower, faces severe threats from global warming. While current planning often focuses on reinforcing centralized infrastructure, this strategy fails to address underlying socioeconomic vulnerabilities. This study argues that tackling this vulnerability requires a major strategic pivot towards decentralized, equitable adaptation. We conduct an integrated assessment, making three key contributions: (1) Using high-resolution (BCC-CSM2-MR, CMIP6) simulations under four SSP scenarios, we project significant regional warming of 1.2–5.2°C by 2100, with the most severe increases in the south. (2) We develop a novel socio-climatic vulnerability index, combining climate and socioeconomic data to identify risk hotspots. This index reveals southern Mozambique as the highest-risk region (VI = 0.72) due to extreme exposure, high sensitivity, and moderate adaptive capacity. (3) We assess adaptation strategies through a multi-criteria framework, showing that decentralized solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are the most robust option, offering significant co-benefits for equity and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our results stress that solving Mozambique's energy vulnerability necessitates a fundamental shift from reinforcing centralized infrastructure to supporting decentralized, fair adaptation. The integrated assessment framework presented offers a transferable model for diagnosing socio-climatic vulnerability in other regions reliant on centralized, climate-vulnerable energy systems.