Climate Change and Sustainable Water Management in Central Asia (original) (raw)

Climate change impacts on Central Asian water resources

2012

Abstract. Central Asia is in large parts dominated by low precipitation and, consequentially, by low water availability. Therefore, changes of natural water resources induced by climate change are of high interest. The aim of this study is to analyse the potential impact of climate change on Central Asian water resources until the end of the 21st century and to point out the main affected regions.

Central Asian rivers under climate change: Impacts assessment in eight representative catchments

Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies, 2021

Study region Eight river catchments within Central Asia. Study focus The limited amount of water resources is already an issue in the Central Asian region, and climate change may be crucial for water availability and development of countries in the region. This study investigates potential climate change impacts on water resources in Central Asia to the end of the century by focusing on eight river catchments with diverse natural conditions located in different countries. The eco-hydrological model SWIM was setup, calibrated and validated for all selected catchments under study. Scenarios from five bias-corrected GCMs under Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5 were used to drive the hydrological model. New hydrological insights for the region The results show an increase of mean annual temperature in all catchments for both RCPs to the end of the century. The projected changes in annual precipitation indicate a clear trend to increase in the Zhabay and to decrease in th...

Contemporary climate change problems in Central Asia

E3S Web of Conferences

According to the moderate climate change scenario, the direct impact of climate change on irrigated crops, including cotton, wheat, apples, tomatoes, and potatoes, is pro-jected to decrease the yields by 1–13% by 2050. However, the demand for food is expected to increase overall due to the population growth and poverty reduction goals. The rate of climate change in the countries varies. The highest decadal rates of climate change were recorded in Uzbekistan at 0.29°C (1950-2005) and in Kazakhstan at 0.26°C (1936-2005). The climate change rate in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were 0.08°C and 0.10°C, respectively. In these upstream countries, the area of forests and mountain ranges is relatively large, and the possible negative impact of climatic factors is relatively small. Thus, the contemporary problems in Central Asia in the context of climate change are related to a growing scarcity of water resources; uneven distribution of water resources across the countries in relation to the nee...

Climate change impacts on Central Asia: Trends, extremes and future projections

Central Asia (CA) is among the world's most vulnerable regions to climate change. Increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations (GHGs) are the primary forcing of the current and future climate system for the time scale of a century. By analysing observation datasets, we show that a warming of 1.2 C led to a decrease of 20% in snow-depth CA during the last 70 years, especially over the mountains. In recent decades, longer summer times and fewer icing days (more than 20 daysÁyear −1) have exposed unprecedented shock to CA's climate system's components. Furthermore, we analyse 442 model ...