Abstract
In the Mediterranean, climate change and human pressures are expected to significantly impact the availability of surface water resources. In order to quantify these impacts during the last 60 years (1959–2018), we examined the hydro-climatic and land use change evolution in six coastal river basins of the Gulf of Lion in southern France. By combining observed water discharge, gridded climate, mapped land use and agricultural censuses data, we propose a statistical regression model which successfully reproduces the variability of annual water discharge in all basins. Our results clearly demonstrate that, despite important anthropogenic water withdrawals for irrigation, climate change is the major driver for the detected reduction of water discharge. The model can explain 78–88% of the variability of annual water discharge in the study catchments. It requires only two climatic indices that are solely computed from monthly temperature (T) and precipitation (P) data, thus allowing the estimation of the respective contributions of both parameters in the detected changes. According to our results, the study region experienced on average a warming trend of 1.6 °C during the last 60 years which alone was responsible for a reduction of almost 25% of surface water resources.
Highlights
The Mediterranean region is warming faster than the world average and should experience drier conditions than today in the near future [1,2,3,4,5]
Despite the fact that anthropogenic water use can strongly influence water discharge in the studied river basins, we clearly demonstrate that climate was the dominant driver for the evolution of surface water resources during the last 60 years
In the context of climate change, which is expected to severely impact surface water resources in the Mediterranean area, such large numbers naturally raise the question of whether these trends are representative for future evolution, and whether they are dominated by climate change and/or by anthropogenic activities in the drainage basins
Summary
The Mediterranean region is warming faster than the world average and should experience drier conditions than today in the near future [1,2,3,4,5]. This region has already been submitted to large climate shifts in the past [6] and is widely recognized as one of the most prominent hotspot regions in future projections [2]. Many studies have analyzed hydro-climate trends in the Mediterranean Region over recent decades (see the reviews from [8,9]).
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