Exploring the impacts of climate change on water resources - regional impacts at a regional scale: Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh is located at the confluence of three major river basins: the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna (GBM) basins. The GWAVA (Global Water AVailability Assessment) model, a global-scale gridded approach to hydrological modelling, has been applied to all GBM basins to investigate the impacts of climate change on water resources at a regional scale. The entire model set-up is composed of a coarse-scale GBM-wide model at 0.5 degrees resolution and a fine-scale model at 0.1 degrees representing Bangladesh. A suite of climate scenarios have been collated from regional climate data using the Hadley Centre’s HadRM2 and that generated by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology using the Hadley Centre’s PRECIS. Scenarios for water demands have been developed for the present and future based on socio-economic data from various publicly available sources and local water management plans. The comparison of water demands with supply using spatial-temporal distributed water availability indices enables areas of future scarcity to be identified.