Groundwater Loss May Triple, Threatening Food and Water Security in Decades | Weather.com - The Weather Channel

Groundwater Loss May Triple, Threatening Food and Water Security in Decades | Weather.com

Farmers in India, adapting to rising temperatures, have intensified groundwater withdrawal for irrigation. If this trend persists, the rate of groundwater loss could triple by 2080, posing a severe threat to India's food and water security, as warned by a recent study led by an Indian-origin researcher.

The reduced water availability in India, resulting from groundwater depletion and climate change, could jeopardise the livelihoods of over one-third of the country's 1.4 billion residents and have global ramifications, according to a study led by the University of Michigan in the US.

India, the world's second-largest producer of staple cereal grains such as rice and wheat, faces a critical situation. "We find that farmers are already increasing irrigation use in response to warming temperatures, an adaptation strategy that has not been accounted for in previous groundwater depletion projections in India," noted senior author Meha Jain, an assistant professor at the university's School for Environment and Sustainability.

"This is of concern, given that India is the world's largest consumer of groundwater and is a critical resource for the regional and global food supply," she emphasised in the study published in the journal Science Advances.

The lead author, Nishan Bhattarai, from the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma (formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Jain's lab), analysed historical data on groundwater levels, climate, and crop water stress to identify recent changes in withdrawal rates due to warming.

The researchers also employed data from ten climate models to project future rates of groundwater loss across India based on temperature and precipitation projections.

Previous studies primarily examined the separate impacts of climate change and groundwater depletion on crop production in India, neglecting farmer decision-making, including their adaptive responses like altering irrigation practices.

The new study considers the likelihood that warmer temperatures will increase water demand from stressed crops, prompting farmers to increase irrigation.

"Using our model estimates, we project that under a business-as-usual scenario, warming temperatures may triple groundwater depletion rates in the future and expand groundwater depletion hotspots to include south and central India," cautioned Bhattarai.

"Without policies and interventions to conserve groundwater, we find that warming temperatures will likely amplify India's already existing groundwater depletion problem, further challenging India's food and water security in the face of climate change," he added.

Earlier studies indicated that climate change could reduce the yield of essential Indian crops by up to 20 per cent by mid-century. Concurrently, the country's groundwater is depleting rapidly, primarily due to irrigation demands.

For this study, the research team developed a comprehensive dataset containing groundwater depths from thousands of wells across India, high-resolution satellite data to measure crop water stress, and temperature and precipitation records.

The research team discovered that warming temperatures, coupled with declining winter precipitation, outweighed the increased groundwater recharge from greater monsoon precipitation, resulting in accelerated groundwater declines.

Across various climate change scenarios, their estimates showed that groundwater level declines between 2041 and 2080 would be more than three times the current depletion rates, on average.

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The above article has been published from a wire source with minimal modifications to the headline and text.