Monsoon Harvests: The Socio-Ecohydrology of Agricultural Rainwater Harvesting and Groundwater Depletion in India
Abstract
Rainwater harvesting (RWH), the small-scale collection and storage of runoff for irrigated agriculture, is recognized as a sustainable strategy for ensuring food security, especially in monsoonal landscapes in the developing world. In south India, these strategies have been used for millennia to mitigate problems of water scarcity. However, in the past 100 years many traditional RWH systems have fallen into disrepair due to increasing dependence on groundwater. This dependence has contributed to an accelerated decline in groundwater resources, which has in turn led to increased efforts at the state and national levels to revive older RWH systems. Critical to the success of such efforts is an improved understanding of how these ancient systems function in contemporary landscapes with extensive groundwater pumping and shifted climatic regimes. Here, we use a combination of data analyses and modeling to quantify the coupled natural and human controls on the spatiotemporal trajectories of groundwater depletion and rainwater harvesting in monsoonal India.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.H51M..01B
- Keywords:
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- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1803 Anthropogenic effects;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1807 Climate impacts;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1834 Human impacts;
- HYDROLOGY