Climate change and groundwater: India’s opportunities for mitigation and adaptation
By T. Shah. Water Resources Policies in South Asia, 2009
318 citations recorded by the source corpus.
For millennia, India used surface storage and gravity flow to water crops. During the last 40 years, however, India has witnessed a decline in gravity-flow irrigation and the rise of a booming ‘water-scavenging’ irrigation economy through millions of small, private tubewells. For India, groundwater has become at once critical and threatened. Climate change will act as a force multiplier; it will enhance groundwater’s criticality for drought-proofing agriculture and simultaneously multiply the threat to the resource. Groundwater pumping with electricity and diesel also accounts for an estimated 16–25 million mt of carbon emissions, 4–6% of India’s total. From a climate change point of view, India’s groundwater hotspots are western and peninsular India. These are critical for climate change mitigation as well as adaptation. To achieve both, India needs to make a transition from surface storage to ‘managed aquifer storage’ as the center pin of its water strategy with proactive demand- and supply-side management components. In doing this, India needs to learn intelligently from the experience of countries like Australia and the United States that have long experience in managed aquifer recharge.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4fac24f4724f3ebf770d79dea4d79eb59e553f62
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In Global and Planetary Change
- D. Dokken
- I. Holman
- K. Mach
- Christopher B. Field
- V. Barros
- M. Mastrandrea
- Richard S. J. Tol
- M. Zeitoun
In Ocean Engineering
In Water Science and Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Climate-Resilient Pathways: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Sustainable Development (2014, background): “…such issues as adaptation implications of the production of biofuels (La Rovere et al., 2009); agriculture and water (Rosenzweig and Tubiello, 2007; Shah, 2009; Falloon and Betts, 2010; Rounsevell et al., 2010; Turner et al., 2010); conservation (Rounsevell et al., 2010; Turner et al., 2010); use…”
- China’s water–energy nexus: greenhouse-gas emissions from groundwater use for agriculture (2012, background): “This has greatly promoted groundwater abstraction which has increased from roughly 10 km3 yr−1 during the 1950s to more than 100 km3 yr−1 in the 2000s (Wang et al 2007, Shah 2009).”