Impact of Climate Change on Natural Resource Management
As climate change takes hold, there is an ever-growing need to develop and apply strategies that optimize the use of natural resources, both on land and in water. This book covers a huge range of strategies that can be applied to various sectors, from for
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Bipal K. Jana Mrinmoy Majumder ●
Editors
Impact of Climate Change on Natural Resource Management
Editors Bipal K. Jana Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India [email protected]
Mrinmoy Majumder Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India [email protected]
ISBN 978-90-481-3580-6 e-ISBN 978-90-481-3581-3 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3581-3 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2010930141 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
Climate change is defined as any long-term change in the statistics of weather over periods of time that range from decades to millions of years. Climate change may occur in a specific region, or across the whole world. The effect of global warming is now predominant in many parts of the world. Twelve warmest years have occurred in the 1900s among which ten have occurred between 1987 and 1998. The energy availability, which was increased due to increase in temperature, had created a ripple effect throughout the Earth system with positive local, regional, and global feedback on each other to amplify and accelerate warming (Stewart and Vemuri 2006). Abnormality in climatic pattern, induced by the accelerated warming, had started to effect catchment-specific hydrologic cycles. In the last 10 years, floods have caused more damage than in the previous 30 years. Higher temperatures lead to a high rate of evaporation and very dry conditions in some areas of the world. Severe weather events are now more common. The number and strength of hurricanes, tornadoes, and other events had increased over the last 15–20 years. As per IPCC (2007), global climate change is expected to affect the performance of water resource systems according to current indicators and findings. The biggest casualty of climate change would be the natural resources. A change in the climate could change the resource capacity as well as the pattern by which the resource is used by the adjacent population. The impact on natural resources, if not controlled by mitigating measures, could lead to extreme situations. But still natural resources of many places were managed without any specific plans and according to demands of the users. The ill-managed resources and climate change could lead any place of the world into the verge of extinction. For example, rivers can cause floods and also supply water for domestic, industrial, and agricultural uses. But if reservoirs and barrages are built to control the river flow, the floods may recede but frequency of floods will increase. A
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