Enhancing production and flow of freshwater ecosystem services in a managed Himalayan river system under uncertain futur
- PDF / 1,092,720 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 77 Downloads / 145 Views
Enhancing production and flow of freshwater ecosystem services in a managed Himalayan river system under uncertain future climate Andrea Momblanch 1 Ian P. Holman 1
2
3
3
& Lindsay Beevers & Pradeep Srinivasalu & Anil Kulkarni &
Received: 28 February 2020 / Accepted: 7 July 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
Future climate change will likely impact the multiple freshwater ecosystem services (fES) provided by catchments through their landscapes and river systems. However, there is high spatio-temporal uncertainty on those impacts linked to climate change uncertainty and the natural and anthropogenic interdependencies of water management systems. This study identifies current and future spatial patterns of fES production in a highly managed water resource system in northern India to inform the design and assessment of plausible adaptation measures to enhance fES production in the catchment under uncertain climate change. A water resource systems modelling approach is used to evaluate fES across the full range of plausible future scenarios, to identify the (worst-case) climate change scenarios triggering the greatest impacts and assess the capacity of adaptation to enhance fES. Results indicate that the current and future states of the fES depend on the spatial patterns of climate change and the impacts of infrastructure management on river flows. Natural zones deliver more regulating and cultural services than anthropized areas, although they are more climate-sensitive. The implementation of a plausible adaptation strategy only manages to slightly enhance fES in the system with respect to no adaptation. These results demonstrate that water resource systems models are powerful tools to capture complex system dependencies and inform the design of robust catchment management measures. They also highlight that mitigation and more ambitious adaptation strategies are needed to offset climate change impacts in highly climate-sensitive catchments.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-02002795-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Andrea Momblanch andrea.momblanch–[email protected]
1
Cranfield University, Cranfield, UK
2
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK
3
Divecha Centre for Climate Change, Bengaluru, India
Climatic Change
Keywords Climate change . Catchment management . Water resource systems modelling . WEAP . Spatial dependencies . Adaptation
1 Introduction Healthy catchments provide multiple freshwater ecosystem services (fES) through their landscapes and rivers—e.g. water regulation and supply, water purification, flood abatement, maintaining aquatic fauna(Guswa et al. 2014; Brauman 2015)—which underpin economic development and social well-being (Hayat and Gupta 2016). Additionally, free-flowing rivers act as ecological networks that enable fES flows across regions (Schröter et al. 2018)—i.e. water regulation and nutrients cycling. Hence, conservation of nature is increasingly considered
Data Loading...
