Handbook of Water Harvesting and Conservation

28Water Harvesting, Climate Change, and Variability

Jew Das¹, Manish Kumar Goyal¹, and N.V. Umamahesh²

¹Discipline of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, India

²Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India

28.1 Introduction

According to the United Nations World Water Development Report (WWDR) (WWAP 2015), the global water demand is significantly influenced by population growth, urbanization, and the security policies for food and energy in the developing countries. The availability of water resources varies in different areas of the globe due to the unpredictable distribution of precipitation and runoff. In addition, due to a combination of factors including climate change, inefficient water supply and distribution systems, and water pollution, an increase in the population will aggravate the distribution and availability of water resources, which in turn will affect the per capita water availability (Eslamian and Okhravi 2015). Based on the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) AQUASTAT dataset (2018), most of the developing countries come under the vulnerability to scarcity zone according to the per capita water availability. Due to the variability in the surface water, groundwater use has augmented and interestingly, India, China, Nepal, and Pakistan extract nearly half the world's total groundwater (WWAP 2015). In this sense, it is understood that developing countries are going to be affected by climate change ...