Assessing the impacts of climate change and socio-economic changes on flow and phosphorus flux in the Ganga river system

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change has impacted and will continue to impact the natural environment and people around the world. Increasing temperatures and altered rainfall patterns combined with socio-economic factors such as population changes, land use changes and water transfers will affect flows and nutrient fluxes in river systems. The Ganga river, one of the largest river systems in the world, supports approximately 10% global population and more than 700 cities. Changes in the Ganga river system are likely to have a significant impact on water availability, water quality, aquatic habitats and people. In order to investigate these potential changes on the flow and water quality of the Ganga river, a multi-branch version of INCA Phosphorus (INCA-P) model has been applied to the entire river system. The model is used to quantify the impacts from a changing climate, population growth, additional agricultural land, pollution control and water transfers for 2041-2060 and 2080-2099. The results provide valuable information about potential effects of different management strategies on catchment water quality.

Modelling the Present and Future Water Level and Discharge of the Tidal Betna River

“…The results revealed an increase in air temperature, and increased monsoon precipitation and discharge, which are in good agreement with other studies of this region [9,12,13,29]. The increased monsoon precipitation and discharge indicate a wetter monsoon season in the future.…”

“…Process-based modelling is often performed to understand hydrodynamics of a basin and to assess the effectiveness of future flood protection infrastructure [9,10]. Several modelling and climate change studies were performed for South-Asian river basins [11][12][13][14].…”

“…However, in-depth studies on assessing combined impact of climate change and SLR on river hydrodynamics are lacking. Moreover, most of the climate change studies have been conducted in large or regional river basins like the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna (GBM) River systems of India and Bangladesh [9,[11][12][13]. No such studies have been performed for a relatively small basin; thus, the influence of climate change on water levels and discharge at the local scale remains unclear.…”

Biophysical Modelling of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Catchment

“…The socio-economic scenarios have a significant impact on water quality, altering nutrient fluxes being transported into the delta region. More details of these results can be found in Whitehead et al (2015a, b) and Jin et al (2015). The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.…”

“…13.5 shows how the flows of the GBM Rivers combine to generate the total flows entering the Bay of Bengal illustrating the buildup of flows in the monsoon season from May to November. The INCA models have been used to evaluate a set of scenarios for flows and water quality, and these are described in detail in Whitehead et al (2015a, b) and Jin et al (2015). These scenarios have been used in the models of the study area in coastal Bangladesh (Chaps.…”