Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF)

This working paper by the Challenge Program for Water and Food explores the intersection between water management, climate change, and adaptation in the Ganges River system, a basin vital to the security, economy, and environment of South Asia. 

Recognizing that an understanding of both the science and the policy of water management, climate change, and adaptation is rapidly evolving, it is not the intention of the paper to encompass all the issues related to these broad fields, but rather to provide a starting framework from which to further develop research questions and priorities for work in water and adaptation.

The paper by the Challenge Program on Water and Food deals with the impact of climate change on water resources & glacier melt and potential adaptations in Indian agriculture. Global climatic changes will have major effects on precipitation, water availability, glacier/ice melt, and sea level rise. Climate-induced changes in hydrological conditions will affect the magnitude, frequency, and damage costs of future extreme events.

The paper generated under the Challenge Program for Water and Food (CPWF) project explores in some depth a totally different dynamic in the irrigation economy of the vast Indo-Gangetic basin (IGB), an important exception to the global characterization. The global debate on ‘‘water as an economic good’’ presumes that irrigation water supply is delivered, controlled, and priced by public institutions. In the developing world, the price of water is kept so low that water use cost leaves farmers no incentive to use it efficiently. 

This paper deals with basin water use accounting and is a contribution to the synthesis work of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) Basin Focal Projects. It applies principles of water use accounts, developed in the first of the series to the Ganges river basin in South Asia. It provides a means to assess the interactions between water, food, poverty, and the environment and helps develop sound information about water availability in a basin, where it goes and how it is used.

This paper deals with basin water use accounting and is a contribution to the synthesis work of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food's (CPWF) Basin Focal Projects. It provides a means to assess the interactions between water, food, poverty, and the environment and helps develop sound information about water availability in a basin, where it goes and how it is used.