Suchergebnisse

We engage in a critical assessment of the neo-malthusian claim that climatic changes can be an important source of international tensions, in the extreme even militarized interstate disputes. The most likely scenario is conflict over water allocation in international catchments shared by poorer, less democratic, and politically less stable countries, governed by weak international water management institutions, and exposed to severe climatic changes. The Syr Darya corresponds quite well to all these characteristics. If the neo-malthusian specter of conflict over water is empirically relevant, we should see signs of this in the Syr Darya. The riparian countries of the Aral Sea basin have experienced international disputes over water allocation ever since the USSR collapsed and, with it, existing water management institutions and funding. The worst such dispute concerns the Syr Darya, one of the two largest rivers in Central Asia. Based on hydrological data and other information we find that the only existing international water management institution in the Syr Darya has failed. Based on a coupled climate, land-ice and rainfall-runoff model for the Syr Darya, we then examine whether, in the absence of an effective international water allocation mechanism, climate change is likely to make existing international tensions over water allocation worse. We find that climate change-induced shifts in river runoff, to which the Uzbek part of the Syr Darya catchment is particularly vulnerable, and which could contribute to a deterioration of already strained Kyrgyz–Uzbek relations, are likely to set in only in the medium to long term. This leaves some time for the riparian countries to set up an effective international framework for water allocation and prevention of climate-induced geohazards. By implication, our findings suggest that a climate change-induced militarized interstate dispute over water resources in Central Asia is unlikely.

Access, maintenance, and distribution of clean water are daunting tasks for developing nations. Efforts to provide clean drinking water have often fallen short, which has prompted the World Bank to advocate for privatization. From a theoretical perspective, privatization blends the advantages of corporate efficiency with responsible management on behalf of the national government. Analysis of attempts to privatize water in the Philippines, with the establishment of the Metropolitan Waterworks Sewerage System (MWSS), shows mixed results. Between 1997 and 2003, citizens with access to water increased from 58 percent to 84 percent, yet water became five times costlier due to privatization. Advocates may applaud the efficiency of the model, but developing nations must emphasize accessibility and affordability of the resource. Privatization, as a model for water distribution, remains contentious.

Abstract
Because of declining public investments in irrigation projects in India, the growth of irrigated agricultural production has increasingly become reliant on unsustainable allocation of groundwater. As a result, groundwater resources are increasingly depleted and their role in buffering climate variability is lost. Given future climate and food supply uncertainty under mounting population pressure, it is vital that the connections between climate variability, unsustainable irrigation practices, and their impacts on regional-scale agricultural production are quantified.
Here, the focus is on rice and maize production in the semiarid Telangana region in Andhra Pradesh, where the advent of inexpensive pump technology in the late twentieth century, coupled with governmentally subsidized electricity, has allowed year-round planting of water-intensive crops. Using a 35-yr climate and agricultural dataset from Telangana, nonlinear Gaussian process district-level regression models are developed to model dry-season irrigated area, which is a proxy for total groundwater use, in the function of climate-related predictors. The resulting models are able to accurately reproduce dry-season cropped area in most districts. Interannual climate variations play a significant role in determining groundwater use for irrigation. Nonlinear interactions between selected climate features are likely to influence irrigation water use significantly. These results suggest that the authors' modeling approach, combined with monsoon predictions, allow the forecasting of cropped area and agricultural water requirements at seasonal time scales within the bounds of uncertainty. The usefulness of such data to decision makers and stakeholders is discussed, as they attempt to use scarce surface and subsurface water resources more efficiently and sustainably.