Sustainable Groundwater Management in Context of Climate Change in Northwest Bangladesh

Abstract

The objectives of the study are to understand the variability and changes in hydroclimatic variables in space and time dimensions, and to evaluate the performance of managed aquifer recharge (MAR) for sustainable water resources management in northwest Bangladesh. The study reveals that groundwater resource in the northwest Bangladesh is under stress. The stress has developed and it increases over the years, as a result, shallow groundwater resource has already become scarce. The people of the area are not getting even drinking water using their hand tube wells (HTWs) during the dry season and facing trouble with irrigation water. These problems are becoming acute as a result of uncontrolled and unplanned groundwater abstraction for irrigation. Moreover, rainfall in the study area decreases and dryness increases. Higher values of the seasonality index (¯ SI = 0.87) and precipitation concentration index (PCI = 19.8) are indicators of frequent dry spells. The area suffered from 12 moderate-extreme droughts during 1971-2011, and moderate to high drought risk (B) prevails in the area. The frequent drought, decreasing trend in rainfall, transboundary river flow, and thick clay surface lithology along with the uncontrolled irrigation are also responsible for rapid depletion of groundwater. As the annual surplus of water (average = 594 mm) is higher than groundwater recharge (330 mm), an experimental study on managed aquifer recharge (MAR) has been conducted to enhance the groundwater recharge. It shows good performance for restoring the groundwater without creating any sorts of hazards. Moreover, almost 5% of irrigated land can be irrigated from surface water sources by re-excavating the rivers, Kharis (small channels). It is necessary to prepare an integrated water resource management plan (IWRMP) considering the impacts of climate change, drought risk, driving factors of the groundwater resource depletion, and rainwater as a resource for achieving the sustainability.

Spatiotemporal Change in Groundwater Sustainability of Bangladesh for the Period 1995-2019

“…Several studies have been conducted to evaluate groundwater changes in Bangladesh (Mojid et al, 2019;Purdy et al, 2019;Rahman et al, 2018;Shamsudduha et al, 2012Shamsudduha et al, , 2011.…”

Spatial Modeling of Groundwater Level in Bangladesh Using Physio-Climatic Variables: Machine Learning and Statistical Approaches

“…However, it is unknown how well it performs in Bangladesh because no studies have validated the reliability of GWS data for the entire country. A few studies, that primarily used GWL data, have evaluated groundwater changes in Bangladesh [15][16][17][18][19] . Very few studies used GWS data obtained from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GLDAS data 17,18 .…”

Abacus to Predict Groundwater Recharge at Non-Instrumented Hydrographic Basins

“…Despite the importance of groundwater in volume, ecology, economy, and society, the lack of knowledge about hydrogeological systems contrasts with scenarios of contamination and depletion of these systems because of inordinate exploitation [1][2][3]. Considering that the remediation and/or recovery of aquifers is, at times, unfeasible [3], management is the best alternative to protect and maintain groundwater reserves [3][4][5]. One of the first steps to implement a groundwater management policy is the knowledge of water availability and for that it is essential to investigate aquifer's renewal rate [6][7][8].…”