Invisible water, visible impact: groundwater use and Indian agriculture under climate change
By E. Zaveri, D. Grogan, Karen Fisher-Vanden, Steve Frolking, R. Lammers, Douglas H. Wrenn, A. Prusevich, R. Nicholas. 2016
197 citations recorded by the source corpus.
India is one of the world’s largest food producers, making the sustainability of its agricultural system of global significance. Groundwater irrigation underpins India’s agriculture, currently boosting crop production by enough to feed 170 million people. Groundwater overexploitation has led to drastic declines in groundwater levels, threatening to push this vital resource out of reach for millions of small-scale farmers who are the backbone of India’s food security. Historically, losing access to groundwater has decreased agricultural production and increased poverty. We take a multidisciplinary approach to assess climate change challenges facing India’s agricultural system, and to assess the effectiveness of large-scale water infrastructure projects designed to meet these challenges. We find that even in areas that experience climate change induced precipitation increases, expansion of irrigated agriculture will require increasing amounts of unsustainable groundwater. The large proposed national river linking project has limited capacity to alleviate groundwater stress. Thus, without intervention, poverty and food insecurity in rural India is likely to worsen.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ccd579aaddb787d8eee5c516273f7060eb28f849
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Ocean Engineering
In Water Science and Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Some Contributions of Integrated Assessment Models of Global Climate Change (2017, background): “If the groundwater aquifers in these regions approach depletion, the cost of water will increase, which will put incredible pressure on farms in regions that are already very vulnerable and poverty stricken (Zaveri et al. 2016).”
- Groundwater sustainability: a review of the interactions between science and policy (2020, background): “We also excluded studies that utilize global hydrological models to study groundwater sustainability at a large scale (Zaveri et al 2016).”