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Abstract
India is one of the world’s largest food producers, making the sustainability of its agricultural system of global significance. Groundwater irrigation underpins India’s agriculture, currently boosting crop production by enough to feed 170 million people. Groundwater overexploitation has led to drastic declines in groundwater levels, threatening to push this vital resource out of reach for millions of small-scale farmers who are the backbone of India’s food security. Historically, losing access to groundwater has decreased agricultural production and increased poverty. We take a multidisciplinary approach to assess climate change challenges facing India’s agricultural system, and to assess the effectiveness of large-scale water infrastructure projects designed to meet these challenges. We find that even in areas that experience climate change induced precipitation increases, expansion of irrigated agriculture will require increasing amounts of unsustainable groundwater. The large proposed national river linking project has limited capacity to alleviate groundwater stress. Thus, without intervention, poverty and food insecurity in rural India is likely to worsen.
Department
Earth Systems Research Center
Publication Date
8-3-2016
Journal Title
Environmental Research Letters
Publisher
Institute of Physics (IOP)
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Zaveri E, DS Grogan, K Fisher-Vanden, S Frolking, RB Lammers, DH Wrenn, A Prusevich, RE Nicholas. 2016. Invisible water, visible impact: How unsustainable groundwater use challenges sustainability of Indian agriculture under climate change, Environ. Res. Lett., 11, 084005, https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084005
Rights
© 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd
Comments
This is an article published by Institute of Physics (IOP) in Environmental Research Letters in 2016, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084005