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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.
Highlights
Healthy catchments provide multiple freshwater ecosystem services 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)
All zones of the catchment produce multiple services, their distinct natural and anthropogenic features result in clear hotspots for freshwater ecosystem services (fES) production
The Himalayas regulate much of the water resources through snow accumulation and melt that, given their low groundwater regulation capacity, support the high levels of provisioning services in the Plains and the Foothills. This natural regulation is important to ensure that rivers in the headwaters preserve their permanent character and provide services directly related to streamflow throughout the year, despite the existence of marked seasonality
Summary
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). Water policies and management approaches (Adeloye and Dau 2019) for these engineered systems in many parts of the world currently allow for only limited consideration of the suite of fES which can be provided by the catchment since they focus on enhancing just the most direct services, i.e. water provisioning for human uses such as drinking, irrigation and hydropower production (Ncube et al 2018; Grill et al 2019)
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