The gap between governmental policy and actions taken by local officials often exists and this gap could be even more severe when it is climate adaptation policy. On the other hand, most of existing studies tend to pay more attention to the structure and the performance of the model rather than the practical operation procedure. To minimize the gap and to evaluate the effectiveness of the adaptation policy, a cross-scale and cross-sector adaptation assessment model, Agriculture and Hydrology assessment model (AgriHydro), is proposed in this study. AgriHydro is established physically to embed top down policies and bottom up local actions and combine with the standard assessment framework, Climate Adaptation 6-Steps and Climate Risk Template, to support decision-making. For sub-models of the AgriHydro, the Aquacrop crop model and the system dynamic water distribution model were calibrated and integrated to form the feedback mechanism. The weather generator (WthGen) modular including climate change scenarios is also established and coupled into the AgriHydro to form a fully functional adaptation assessment tool. An actual application for analyzing the adaptation policy for water supply and crop yield in Taoyuan City of Taiwan is implemented due to the diversity and the complexity of Taoyuan City in land use and water system. The results reflect the possible trade-off of future risks between water resource and agriculture fields under different climate and social scenarios. Moreover, this study shows that the proposed model can provide the linkage to the standard assessment framework, which allows a consist understanding among users on risk and model output. This enables AgriHydro to become a practical and operational tool for decision making and ready for further application.
