Climate change impact assessment of water resources of India - A paper from Current Science

This paper published in the journal Current Science presents the findings of a study has been taken up to quantify the possible impacts of the climate change on the water resources of Indian river systems within the constraints of the uncertainty of climate change predictions. The study uses the PRECIS daily weather data to determine the spatio-temporal water availability in the river systems.

A distributed hydrological model, namely SWAT has been used to simulate all the river basins of the country. The analysis has been performed to evaluate the severity of droughts and floods and thus identify the vulnerable hotspots that may require attention in view of the climate change in various parts of the country.

Impacts of climate change and climate variability on the water resources are likely to affect irrigated agriculture, installed power capacity, environmental flows in the dry season and higher flows during the wet season, thereby causing severe droughts and floods in urban and rural areas. Climate change impacts on water resources which are addressed and analysed in the present study include impacts on annual and inter-annual water availability as well as extreme events of droughts and floods. The paper ends by informing that the study can be useful for the formulation of the National and State Action Plans on Climate Change undertaken by the country. Specific conclusions are not presented in the paper because of the vastness of the conclusions and also due to the fact that all these inferences are provided in a graphical form for the users to draw their own conclusions. Moreover, these results have also been made available in a GIS portal available at http:// gisserver.civil.iitd.ac.in/natcom for use by a large crosssection of users.

The entire paper can be accessed from this link