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Water Resources Management For Climate Change Adaptation and Sustainable Water Security
Water Resources Management For Climate Change Adaptation and Sustainable Water Security
N. H. Rao
Adapted from: CGWB 2015; World Resources Group – India Water Data Tool, 2015; Asoka et al, 2017
Water security status: water stress (rain deficit) and
storage requirement
• NDI <1; small local intra-annual water
storage will suffice
• NDI > 1; medium annual carry over storage
or groundwater can meet deficits of worst
droughts at specified risk levels
• NDI > 5; districts have chronic multi-year
water stress
• large surface storage or groundwater
Normalized needed to meet multi-year drought deficit
Deficit Index
• corresponding districts currently have
canal irrigation & critical levels of
groundwater exploitation
Even without climate change:
• water security in many regions is at risk
Normalized deficit Index (NDI) = • risks will increase and spread to more
Maximum accumulated water deficit in a district in n years
regions as water demand increases with
Average rainfall for the period
(n = 104 years) population & and incomes (~ 70% by 2050)
1 2 3
2021-50
4
2071-98
2021-50 2071-98
• Extreme flows (99th percentile) increase by 10-50% leading to flooding in majority of the
river basins; few sub-basins show some decrease in the peak flows
• dependable (10th percentile) flows also increase; in some basins in central India
dependable flows decline
• Substantial efforts required to develop future water management strategies
Adapted from: CGWB 2015; McDonald et al, 2016, Asoka et al, 2017
The state-of-art of the science for climate smart water management
Climate change projections: Climate change hydrology
spatial resolutions and data
CMIP 5 GCMs (spatial High resolution hydrologic models for Indian river
resolutions of 60-300 km ) basins including runoff generation, water balance
predict quite well annual and streamflow routing increasingly available
mean temperature and CWC & NRSC's WRIS provides geospatial
precipitation and extremes hydrologic products at 16.5 km resolution on surface
Increasing confidence in runoff, evapotranspiration, soil moisture and river
CORDEX/RCMs downscaled discharge with two-day time lag
predictions to 50/25 km Groundwater hydrology and quality not so
resolutions for regional extensively explored and researched in India
applications
GRACE, ESA-CIC and SWOT satellite data on
Downscaled information at groundwater levels, soil moisture and surface water
finer resolutions relevant to available in public domain
hydrologic modelling
Daily 5m resolution satellite products available for
becoming feasible with big
land use monitoring from microsatellites
data methods (NASA, Climate
(Planet.com)
Corp)
Issue: data access on flows, groundwater levels,
Issue: easy/free access to
hydrogeology, water quality; access to authenticated
authenticated high resolution
high resolution digital data on topography, land use,
climate data for hydrologic
soils, river flows, groundwater levels, water quality
studies
Guiding principles for framework for operationalizing climate smart
sustainable water security in India
• Water security in India is equally concerned with Digital watershed atlas of India
green water (soil water), and blue water (surface and is a source for such typology
groundwater) as over 60 mha will be rainfed and scaling of model outputs
• Groundwater recharge management is key to future
water security
• A one size fits all approach does not work as climate,
natural resources, water use vary spatially
• But one-water concept is central
• Climate smart water security management framework
must :
• be based on scalable typologies representative of
spatial heterogeneities
• be informed by high resolution data and scalable,
integrable climate-soil water-surface water-
groundwater hydrologic models
• identify and leverage opportunities for natural and
artificial groundwater recharge, and augmentation
from other sources to mitigate risks
Framework for water security
• Policies that:
• encourage rapid adoption of technologies for efficient water use
• ensure timely action and adaptation towards risk reduction
• enable free access to data and models to enhance the capacity of science to provide
improved solutions
• allow leveraging digital India capacities for data generation and access, and
technology transfer
Thank You