Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources in Semi-Arid Region of Chittorgarh, India

Abstract

Climate change is considered as a substantial anthropogenic global environment threat. This paper presents a framework for assessing climate change impacts on water resources of the Chittorgarh district, Rajasthan (India). Various vulnerability indicators have been considered as the assessment criteria which deal mainly with vulnerability aspects of water availability, climatic conditions, the current status of agriculture/irrigation area, sensitivity, water governance and coping capacity. These factors are finally integrated to evaluate potential impacts of climate change on water resources in the selected region. An outranking method is applied to obtain a temporal ranking of the alternatives, i.e. year-wise performance of the region. To increase the reliability of results, verification is performed using two multi-criteria approaches, namely analytical hierarchy process and social choice methods by taking into consideration of above assessment criteria. A future trend of vulnerability aspects has also been derived using various prediction techniques.