Elsevier

Journal of Hydrology

Volume 590, November 2020, 125260
Journal of Hydrology

Research papers
Water scarcity-risk assessment in data-scarce river basins under decadal climate change using a hydrological modelling approach

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2020.125260Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We developed a simple water scarcity-risk assessment framework using SWAT.

  • Estimated individual LULC/Climate change effects on basin-scale water balance fluxes.

  • The approach can be applied under non-availability of basin-scale water demands.

  • Estimated uncertainty of dominating drivers on streamflow using quantile regression.

  • Climate change show relatively higher impact on streamflow than LULC.

Abstract

Basin-scale water scarcity, an adverse consequence of the imbalance between the available fresh water and water demands, is an alarming situation in many countries worldwide. This necessitates for analyzing the risk of water scarcity forced with the changing climate, land-use alterations, growing population, and industrialization to pave a way for sustainable water resources systems planning and management. This study advocates a hydrological model-based evaluation approach employing Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to identify the dominating drivers on the decadal streamflow patterns and other basin-scale water balance components, viz., blue water flow (BWF), green water storage (GWS), and green water flow (GWF) in the Brahmani and Baitarani River basins of eastern India. The results reveal that, in these basins, the climate change effect has relatively a higher impact on streamflow than the land-use change. This study surmises that the Brahmani and Baitarani River basins can be categorized under the high- and moderate-risk water scarcity zones, respectively. The developed approach of assessing the water scarcity risk under the non-availability of basin-scale sectoral water demands could be a reliable tool for many data-scarce river basins worldwide.

Introduction

Water scarcity risk, a global issue, is accelerating as a result of an increase in sectoral water demands and reduced basin-scale water availability caused by climate change-induced uneven temporal distribution in rainfall and reduced streamflow. Spatiotemporal inconsistency between availability and demand may create a risk of water scarcity across the earth. Rapid industrialization, urbanization, population growth, higher living standards, and modifications in water consumption patterns by different sectors are the anthropogenic factors for the intensified water demands. Additionally, climate change in terms of altered weather patterns, an increase in greenhouse gases, and deforestation impact the streamflow variation affecting the basin-scale water availability (Turral et al., 2011). According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), almost every continent is going to face the potential impact of water stress over the next decades (Collins, 2018). Although India is not experiencing any water stress situation at present, the projected water demand may increase by 24% and 74% by 2025 and 2050, respectively (GOI (Government of India), 1999, Saleth, 2011).

Streamflow is a combined response of many hydrological processes that includes meteorological forcing (precipitation and temperature), morphologic characteristics of the basin (slope, elevation), geologic attributes of the underground system, and anthropogenic activities (reservoir/dam construction, land-use change, and excessive water exploitation). Past studies highlight the spatial and temporal disparities of streamflow as the adverse effect of climate change and/or different rigorous human interventions (Ma et al., 2009, Mango et al., 2011, Wang et al., 2013, Zhan et al., 2014, Mittal et al., 2016, Sun et al., 2016, Bu et al., 2018, Han et al., 2019). As a result, the streamflow of many river basins decreased considerably as compared to the natural flow regime. The threat of water scarcity is expected to be high due to the lack of holistic expertise of basin-scale hydrology, specifically the causes and effects of streamflow variations (Li et al., 2018).

In addition to streamflow, the other water balance components are necessary for the agricultural sector, industrial demand, human consumption, food security, and energy generation (Schuol et al., 2008). Recent studies on basin-scale water availability have focused on the quantification of Internal Renewable Water Resources (IRWR) in terms of blue water flow (BFW), crop evapotranspiration in terms of green water flow (GFW), and green water storage (GWS) with the soil moisture storage component (Schuol et al., 2008, Faramarzi et al., 2009, Vanham, 2016, Yuan et al., 2019). The existing studies of freshwater evaluation at the global and continental scales were applied for water stress analysis (Vörösmarty et al., 2005), climate change and its impact on socioeconomic scenarios (Alcamo et al., 2007), seasonal and inter-annual water storage alteration analysis (Guntner et al., 2007), and global water scarcity assessment in light of environmental water demand (Smakhtin, 2004). However, the regional-scale assessments are important to help the decision-makers to propose balanced water resource management strategies with prospective socioeconomic pathways (Alcamo et al., 2017). Although few studies highlight the changing pattern of streamflow due to climate variation and/or land-use conversion effect as well as alteration of different water balance components like baseflow, surface runoff, groundwater, and evapotranspiration (ET) at basin-scale in India (e.g., Anand et al., 2018, Das et al., 2018, Visakh et al., 2019), however, they do not emphasize the inherent water scarcity risk to the basin-scale hydrology.

With the growing concern of ecological water resources management, the key questions arise as a proof of the concept advocated in this study are: 1) how significant are the individual influence of climate change and land-use land-cover alteration for two typical selected data-scarce composite river basins? 2) How a basin is vulnerable to these driving factors on a decadal time scale? 3) Are there any variations in basin-scale water balance components at a decadal time scale? And 4) Whether water scarcity issues can be analyzed integrating streamflow variation and water availability components in terms of water balance fluxes when information on basin-scale water demands are scarce? To address these research questions, the main aim of this study is to investigate the dominating influence of climate change and land-use alteration to the streamflow of the selected typical Brahmani-Baitarani River basin employing a hydrological modelling framework, namely, SWAT at a decadal time scale. The basin-scale water availability assessment in terms of hydrological flux components incorporating streamflow variation is carried out to portray the risk of water scarcity.

Section snippets

Study area

For the present study, the composite Brahmani-Baitarani River basin in eastern India is selected. The 799 km long Brahmani River basin is bounded in between 83°52′E to 87°50′E longitudes and 20°28′N to 23°35′N latitudes with an extent of 36,790 km2. The Baitarani River basin (12,094 km2) extends from 20°30′N to 22°20′N latitudes and 85°05′E to 87°05′E longitudes. The elevation of both the river basins ranges from the mean sea level to 1190 m which reduces to 10 m downward of the basin towards

Land use/cover changes in the basin

The percentage of basin area under different land-use classes is illustrated in Table 2. It is noticed from Fig. 2 that the agricultural land and deciduous forests are two major land use classes in the composite Brahmani-Baitarani River basins. An overall increasing trend is observed in agricultural land, shrubland, mixed forest, and urban land classes during the study period (1980–2009) in both the river basins. Deciduous forests exhibit a decrease in the areal extent which may be due to human

Model and scenarios response to climate change and LULC

In this study, the influence of climate change and LULC has been assessed on the hydrological cycle of the Brahmani and Baitarani basins. In this context, the long-term hydro-climatic variables are divided into 3 decades (1980–1989, 1990–1990, 2000–2009). Linear trend analysis is carried out to examine the variations of hydro-climatic variables for different time slices as shown in the studies by Ji and Duan (2019). A set of four scenarios is defined to study the dominating impacts of climate

Conclusions

In this study, the temporal variations of key meteorological factors (i.e., precipitation and temperature) of climate, including the important hydrological variable (i.e., streamflow) of a typical composite Brahmani-Baitarani River basins in eastern India are analyzed. Further, the influence of climate change and LULC alterations on streamflow variations has been explored at a decadal time scale using SWAT hydrological model. The calibrated and validated model results are extended to study the

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Sushree Swagatika Swain: Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing - original draft. Ashok Mishra: Conceptualization, Supervision. Bhabagrahi Sahoo: Visualization, Writing - review & editing. Chandranath Chatterjee: Investigation, Resources.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The hydro-meteorological data used in this study are available with the Central Water Commission, New Delhi, and India Meteorological Department, Pune. These data can be accessed from these agencies after fulfilling the data sharing policy. The research fellowship provided to the first author by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, Govt. Of India is duly acknowledged. The financial support from the Department of Science and Technology, GoI with Sanction No. DST/CCP/CoE/79/2017(G) is

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