Water In The Age Of Climate Change

Context: An overview of new challenges and strategies on water and its management on account of climate change.

Implications of climate change on water management

• Rising temperature: Every year becoming the hottest year in recorded history. For e.g. In India, temperatures in parts of Odisha crossed 40°C as early as February.
  • Although 2021 is the year of La Niña — the Pacific water currents that are known to bring cool temperatures globally as compared to El Niño, global warming has offset this cooling effect of La Niña.
  • Implications on water management:
    • Greater water evaporation.
    • Drying up of moisture in the soil, making the land dusty and increase the need for irrigation, further intensifying land degradation.
    • Increased demand for water from drinking and irrigation to fighting fires in forests or buildings.
    • Increased extreme rain events -> We can expect rain to come like a flood, making the cycle of floods followed by droughts even more intense.

What we already know and practice:

• Augment water availability by harvesting every drop of rainwater;
• Use water much more efficiently so that every drop of that rainwater is valued in the food we eat or the water we flush;
• Ensure that every drop of that used water is reused and recycled and not degraded by pollution.

Strategies for addressing the new water challenges

• Tackling greater evaporation from water bodies on account of rising temperatures: E.g. Shift to ways to reduce evaporative losses like under-ground water storage.
• Tackling loss of moisture in soil: Need for vegetation planning along with expanding irrigation.
• Tackling increased demand for water due to increased need for irrigation, forest fires etc.: Reduce water wastage and implement recycling systems.
• Tackling extreme events like floods: Need for advanced flood management techniques optimizing the water utilization.
  • Build adapting water structures for handling extreme rainfall: Our water structures, being constructed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, are designed for normal rainfall.