Climate Change and Groundwater: Vulnerability, Adaptation and Mitigation Opportunities in India

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most important global environmental challenges, with implications for food production, water supply, health, energy, etc. Addressing climate change requires a good scientific understanding as well as coordinated action at national and global level. During the last 40 years, India has witnessed a decline in gravity-flow irrigation and the rise of a booming ‘water-scavenging’ irrigation economy through millions of small and private tube wells. The groundwater has become at once critical and threatened. Climate change will act as a force multiplier; it will enhance groundwater’s criticality for drought-proofing agriculture and simultaneously multiply the threat to the resource. India’s groundwater hotspots are western and peninsular regions. These regions are critical for climate change mitigation as well as adaptation. To achieve both, India needs to make a transition from surface storage to ‘managed aquifer storage’ as the centre pin of its water strategy with proactive demand- and supply-side management components.