Category: Integrated Water Resources Management

The Kosi is a transboundary river that springs from the Himalayan slopes of Tibet and flows through the Northern Himalayan region. 

The Kosi River Basin covers 74,500km2 and drains into the river Ganga through numerous channels, eventually passing through Bangladesh to the sea in the Bay of Bengal.

The basin supports the lives and livelihoods of 40 million people, more than 80 percent of whom depend on agriculture for food and employment. Now, concern is growing that climate change is disrupting the basin’s ecology and will seriously damage millions of lives.

The basin has already faced repeated disasters including landslides, floods, and glacial lake outbursts that have devastated downstream communities.

In 2020, some 9.6 million people in the Kosi River Basin, reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic, were inundated by monsoon flooding in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh.

There is a growing need for citizen-centered approaches to water governance and transboundary cooperation. 

In this article, we call for a more inclusive paradigm of water governance, guided by the needs of riparian communities and an ethos of cooperation and conservation, rather than transboundary water politics and ecologically ineffective infrastructure development.

There is a growing need for citizen-centered approaches to water governance and transboundary cooperation.

The ecology and climate of the Kosi River Basin

The Kosi Basin illustrates the interconnected effects of climate change and man-made interventions on lives and ecosystems in a transboundary basin.

Floods impact agricultural production as fields remain submerged for months. Growing population density, urbanization, and encroachment on watersheds put additional pressure on the basin’s freshwater ecosystems. 

Water disasters in the basin, triggered or amplified by poorly planned infrastructure, strike communities without regard to international borders.

In 2008, the Kosi breached the man-made embankments that had been built to control and contain it, with grave consequences for 2.64 million people in India and Nepal, taking lives and destroying livelihoods on both sides of the border.

The floods deposited sand and silt on arable lands that left them unfit for cultivation for years. In Nepal, 4,648 hectares of agricultural land were ruined.

In Bihar, India’s most flood-prone state, the 2008 floods damaged 100,000 hectares of wheat and rice farmland and the livelihoods of around 500,000 farmers.

Communities living along the basin are among the most economically disadvantaged, the most vulnerable to natural disasters, and the least able to adapt and respond to rapid ecosystem degradation.

In India, the Kosi flows through one of the poorest states, Bihar, where a majority of the rural population is dependent on agriculture. In Nepal, 40 percent of the population in the basin lives below the poverty line. 

While high-profile hydropower projects in the basin have been a development priority, they are yet to improve livelihoods or other socio-economic benefits in the basin, including electricity access.

These socio-economic inequities were echoed in a series of multi-stakeholder dialogues in the basin, organized by community-based NGOs and organizations supported by The Asia Foundation, in which the communities described the challenges they face in the Kosi River Basin.

Development issues persist across the board, from lack of a minimum wage or access to land to inadequate healthcare, sanitation, and education.

Male migration from the region has increased in the last decade. Women are particularly affected by the lack of sanitation and freshwater for domestic care work.

Riverine communities are adapting to climate change

In the 1950s, thick embankments were constructed along 150km of the Kosi River to defend against flooding. While farmers had traditionally constructed bandhs—low structures of mud and stones to control flooding and support irrigation—these were intentionally temporary, and although flooding still occurred in rural villages, the large expanses of floodplain slowed the flow of floodwaters and reduced damage to property and livelihoods. 

The floods nourished agricultural lands in the region. But beginning as early as colonial times, successive governments built permanent embankments that altered the natural drainage of the basin and cut off the river from its surrounding floodplains. 

Unlike the traditional bandhs, these embankments often stand some distance from the river, sometimes closer to villages, and completely block the natural drainage of water in the floodplain.

The rationale was to protect farms, livelihoods, and development infrastructure from flood damage, but the effect was often just the opposite. 

As the Kosi River flows through the Himalayan mountainous regions, it carries with it large amounts of silt that it deposits onto the plains of Nepal and northern India. 

When traditional irrigation channels that conducted water and silt through the floodplains were subsumed by large embankment projects, it altered this flow, causing unchecked accumulation of sand and silt.

The embankments were equipped with sluice gates that could be opened or closed to control the flow of water in the main river channel, but disrepair and poor management of the gates have allowed silt to accumulate within the embankments, raising the riverbed and causing water to flow into the villages.

There the floodwaters stagnate, depositing silt and sand that make the land inarable. Families in villages between successive embankments must evacuate to higher ground when waters rise. 

Often, they are unable to move due to socio-economic reasons and remain excluded from basic government disaster relief.

Moving from water management to inclusive water governance

Water—its scarcity or abundance—shapes ecosystems and communities. Governments in the Kosi River Basin have pursued a centralized, institutional approach to water governance that has focused on irrigation, flood control embankments, and hydroelectric development.

Experts have observed that inhabitants of the disaster-prone basin live with piecemeal information on environmental risks. Adapting to new extreme weather scenarios requires regional and subregional support systems, projects, and laws.

What is needed is a citizen-centered approach that involves local communities in managing water resources. 

When community stakeholders in the basin are involved in resource management, their knowledge of local conditions and familiarity with their own needs create opportunities for more informed, inclusive, and integrated solutions.

The Asia Foundation has partnered with the Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG) and the Centre for Policy Research in India, and with ISET-Nepal and Policy Entrepreneurs Inc. in Nepal, to better understand the lives of communities in the basin and their water governance needs. 

The project has launched multi-stakeholder dialogues and knowledge-sharing initiatives to develop evidence-based water governance mechanisms and transboundary collaborations in the basin. 

A Transboundary Citizen’s Forum has built the capacity of partner organizations to promote community understanding, trust, and collaboration.

Towards transboundary water cooperation

Several mechanisms for cooperation on ecological conservation and resilience already exist. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 highlights the need for collaborative, regional response mechanisms and revised institutional mandates. 

The Thimphu Statement on climate change emphasizes regional cooperation, the sharing of best practices, and an integrated approach to climate change in South Asia. 

Other initiatives include intergovernmental platforms for disaster preparedness and information-sharing support for communities to better anticipate and plan for disasters. 

Pilot projects are needed to develop local strategies. The time has come to “coexist with the river” rather than opposing its flow.

Malavika Thirukode is a Program Officer and Manvi Tripathi is a former Intern with the Asia Foundation’s India-U.S. Triangular Development Partnership (TriDeP). 

Malavika can be reached at: malavika.thirukode@asiafoundation.org. 

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, not those of The Asia Foundation.

This piece was previously published on The Asia Foundation’s InAsia blog on March 16, 2022.

Climate change has brought about increased temperature and shifts in precipitation patterns around the world, impacting the water resources sector. 

The IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6) highlights that changes in extremes have been observed, causing extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones due to global warming.

Continued global warming is projected to further intensify the global water cycle, spreading its variability, global monsoon precipitation pattern, and the severity of wet and dry events, impacting availability of water resources and their management throughout the world. 

Groundwater is an important component of the freshwater regime for agriculture, drinking water supplies, and sustaining ecosystems.

It modulates the temperature and baseflow of rivers, lakes and wetlands; regulates exchanges of nutrients and minerals; and prevents land subsidence and seawater intrusion. 

Groundwater, often unseen and neglected, holds immense promise in our adaptation to climate change and needs to be judiciously managed.

According to the United Nations World Water Development Report 2022 (UNWWDR 2022), which uses 2017 data, the global rates for withdrawal of freshwater exceeds 3,881 km3 per year, with groundwater contributing about a quarter of the total withdrawal. 

Estimates show that about 959 km3 (959 trillion liters) of groundwater were withdrawn in 2017, out of which 69 percent was for agriculture, 22 percent for domestic and 9 percent for industrial use.

Groundwater is important, for agriculture – food production and security, while domestic use, though smaller in volume, is critical for survival. Almost 50 percent of the global urban population depends on groundwater as the primary source for drinking water and its societal importance far outweighs the volume of extraction.

Sound groundwater management actions need to be implemented to better safeguard this vital resource

Asia withdraws the highest volume of freshwater: 2,505 km3 every year, of which 657 km3 is groundwater. This represents about 69 percent of the total world groundwater extraction. 

These figures are large for Asia, due to its large population and water-intensive agricultural practices in the region. Groundwater withdrawal in South Asia alone is about 401 km3 per year. 

Groundwater is a spread resource, available where there is an aquifer and providing direct access to consumers. It is generally of a high quality, and is not directly impacted by rainfall variability. 

It is also less polluted than surface water. This poses opportunities for exploitation as well as constraints in the management of this valuable resource. 

Water resources management, on a broad scale, requires information on future water availability and requirements of a finer temporal and spatial resolution, to decide on new projects as well as on the operation and maintenance of existing systems.

The existing and future needs and demands are both affected by climate change at the river-basin and local scales. It is certain that the future demands on groundwater and reliance on this resource will increase due to the increasing uncertainty of surface water. 

Surface water is directly impacted by climate change and its ushering in of extreme events, more intense rainfall and floods, along with extended periods of drought which create water stresses. 

This will potentially increase the rates of groundwater extraction, lowering water tables of already-stressed aquifers.

The direct impacts of climate change on groundwater is still the subject of research. The recharge of aquifers takes place via widespread “evaporation-surplus” rain as well as express recharge pathways such as leakage from rivers, ephemeral streams, wetlands, or lakes. Groundwater systems respond at a slower pace to climate change than surface-water systems. 

Rising temperature reduces water available for infiltration by evaporating more water from the surface, soil profile, and even, shallow aquifers, enhancing soil salinity and raising the temperature of shallow groundwater, with possible repercussions on the physio-chemical properties of water.

Variabilities in rainfall affect groundwater differently. It is commonly believed that in humid areas, intense rainfall of a shorter duration limits the time available for infiltration; top soil remains saturated during precipitation and a higher portion of rainfall is partitioned into runoff, thus reducing groundwater recharge.

Variations in aquifer recharge not only change the aquifer yield or discharge, they can also modify the groundwater flow network; e.g. gaining streams may suddenly become losing streams, groundwater divides may change position. 

It should be noted that the effect of climate change on groundwater is often impacted by indirect effects, introduced by anthropogenic choices in response to adapting to climate change.

In mountainous areas, snow and glacier melt generally dominate mountain hydrology. Groundwater contribution to runoff can be significant during the spring and the dry season, providing a perennial or seasonal groundwater supply to mountainous springs and ecosystems. 

Melting snow, permafrost and glaciers provide a steady water supply for infiltration in the near future, while the distant future could face water scarcity due to the absence of these storages of water. 

Climate change impacts are often blamed for a reduction in the flow – or even the drying-up – of springs in Nepal, as well as in Sikkim, in the Eastern Himalayas; but these could be complicated by anthropogenic reasons including land use changes. 

The alteration of groundwater quality due to overextraction or polluted runoff including contaminants from fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides or municipal wastes such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs) and even sewage leakages, are all issues that need to be strictly controlled and managed to assure the sustainability of this vital resource. 

It should be understood that climate change’s effects on groundwater are amplified by our actions. The net effect of climate change on groundwater depends not only on changing climatic conditions but also on the physical characteristics of a region, human actions and management decisions.

Sound groundwater management actions need to be implemented to better safeguard this vital resource and enhance our adaptive capabilities, with a better understanding of the impacts of climate change and human interventions on groundwater. 

The CARE for South Asia project is carrying out the scoping study on impact of climate change on groundwater resource in Nepal in to better understand the ground realities and the necessity for planning ahead. 

The writer is Water Resources Management Specialist in Nepal at ADPC and can be reached at: laxman.sharma@adpc.net