Sustainability

21Climate Change Adaptation for Sustainable Management of Water in India: Issues and Challenges

Adani Azhoni

Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India

21.1 Introduction

Climate change is arguably the biggest challenge the world faces today (IPCC 2014a). The increase in global mean temperature will have many cascading effects on planet earth including increasing the melting of the icecaps, leading to sea level rise (Raper 2005) and displacement of people from low-lying coastal areas, in addition to sea water intrusion into freshwater aquifers. Climate change has the potential to exacerbate the distorted distribution of water both temporally and spatially (IPCC 2014a; Seneviratne et al. 2012). Moreover, glacier-fed river systems, such as those arising from the Himalayas, will undergo drastic changes in the seasonal river discharges, leading to floods and droughts in different seasons (Xu et al. 2009). The retreating glaciers (Seneviratne et al. 2012) and the changing monsoon cycle (Hassan et al. 2015; Singh 2013) in the Indian subcontinent, for example, will adversely affect freshwater availability and quality for about a billion people living in this region.

The rise in global temperatures will also trigger increased water demand (Wang et al. 2014) due to increased evapotranspiration leading to water shortages. Moreover, the precipitation patterns across the world are projected to change, with wet areas becoming even more wet ...