Abstract
The heavily industrialised Kanpur region is the most polluted stretch of the Ganga river because of excessive pollutant discharge from the industries. Agricultural runoff along with climate change further adds to the pollution risk in this industrialised stretch of Ganga. In this paper, we analyse the potential impacts of climate change and land use change on the water quality in this stretch under hypothetical scenarios using the water quality model, QUAL2K. Water quality indicators of Dissolved Oxygen (DO), Biochemical Oxygen Demand, ammonia, nitrate, total nitrogen, organic-, inorganic- and total phosphorous and faecal coliform are assessed for eight climate change and six land use land cover scenarios. Eutrophic conditions are observed in this stretch of the river for all scenarios, implying severe impacts on aquatic life. DO is identified as the most sensitive indicator to the climate change scenarios considered, while nutrients and faecal coliform are more sensitive to the land use scenarios. Increase in agricultural land area leads to larger nutrient concentration while increase in built-up area causes an increase in faecal coliform concentration. Results from this hypothetical study could provide valuable guidance for improving the water quality of the Ganges in future climate change and land use change scenarios.
Highlights
In recent studies, quantification of non-point sources (NPS), mainly due to agricultural runoff has been performed using flux method[10], mean concentration method[11] and SWAT model[12,13,14]
Change in water quality indicators - Dissolved Oxygen (DO), BOD, ammonia, nitrate, total nitrogen, organic phosphorus, inorganic phosphorus, total phosphorus and faecal coliform (FC) - relative to the base condition is evaluated for each scenario
Historical water quality analysis carried out using the indicators such as minimum, mean and maximum DO, BOD, nitrate and ammonia (Fig. S1 (a),(b) and (c)) for Ankinghat, Kanpur and Shahzadpur, clearly indicates the reduction in DO and increase in BOD, nitrate and ammonia concentration for Ankinghat and Kanpur
Summary
Quantification of non-point sources (NPS), mainly due to agricultural runoff has been performed using flux method[10], mean concentration method[11] and SWAT model[12,13,14]. Several studies have assessed the impact of climate change and socio-economic change on nitrogen and phosphorus flux in the Ganga basin using a process based Integrated catchment (INCA) model[32,33,34,35,36,37]. These studies find that the concentrations of nitrate, ammonia and phosphorus would decrease with increase in flow predicted for future SRES A1B climate change scenario. The inferences drawn from such modelling studies would be immensely helpful for policy makers in identifying hotspots for making corrective interventions
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