Potential Sites for Rainwater Harvesting Focusing on the Sustainable Development Goals Using Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System

Abstract

An innovative way to combat water scarcity brought on by population increase and climate change is rainwater harvesting (RWH), particularly in arid and semiarid areas. Currently, Pakistan is facing major water issues due to underprivileged water resource management, climate change, land use changes, and the sustainability of local water resources. This research aims to find out the suitable sites and options for RWH structures in the Quetta district of Pakistan by integrating the depression depth technique, Boolean analysis, and weighted linear combination (WLC) with hydrological modeling (HM), multicriteria analysis (MCA), a geographic information system (GIS), and remote sensing (RS). To find suitable sites for RWH, a collection of twelve (12) thematic layers were used, including the slope (SL), land use land cover (LULC), subarea (SA), runoff depth (RD), drainage density (DD), lineament density (LD), infiltration number (IFN), distance from built-up area (DB), distance from roads (DR), distance from lakes (DL), maximum flow distance (MFD), and topographic wetness index (TWI). The Boolean analysis and WLC approach were integrated in the GIS environment. The consistency ratio (CR) was calculated to make sure the assigned weights to thematic layers were consistent. Overall, results show that 6.36% (167.418 km2), 14.34% (377.284 km2), 16.36% (430.444 km2), 18.92% (497.663 km2), and 18.64% (490.224 km2) of the area are in the categories of very high, high, moderate, low, and very low suitability, respectively, for RWH. RWH potential is restricted to 25.35% (666.86 km2) of the area. This research also identifies the five (5) best locations for checking dams and the ten (10) best locations for percolation tanks on the streams. The conducted suitability analysis will assist stakeholders in selecting the optimal locations for RWH structures, facilitating the storage of water, and addressing the severe water scarcity prevalent in the area. This study proposes a novel approach to handle the problems of water shortage in conjunction with environmental and socioeconomic pressures in order to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs).