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A University of Michigan-led study found that groundwater depletion rates could triple in India in the coming decades as global temperatures increase and the amount of water needed for irrigation increases. The study was funded by a grant from NASA and was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.
Farmers in India have started to withdraw more groundwater used for irrigation due to increasing temperatures around the world. The U-M study found that the increasing groundwater depletion rates will threaten the livelihoods of one-third of the population in India.
Using remote sensing — a means of obtaining data about groundwater levels through satellite imagery — the study looked at climate and crop water stress to determine how water depletion rates have changed over time in India. Unlike other studies, this study took qualitative data about farmer’s decision-making into account.
Meha Jain is a senior author of the study and associate professor of geospatial data science at the School for Environment and Sustainability. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Jain said doing fieldwork in India and talking to farmers helped her understand how their decisions affect depletion rates.
“We ran some surveys with farmers in India, and they kept saying that one of the biggest ways that they adapt to warming temperatures is by increasing the number of irrigations they use,” Jain said. “So instead of making assumptions about what people are going to do, we can measure how farmers are changing their practices based on temperature increases.”
According to Jain, remote sensing techniques have advanced climate research by expanding the areas of the world that can be mapped from outer space.
“We are in a really exciting time to be doing remote sensing,” Jain said. “There are so many satellites that are becoming available across the globe and they’re allowing us to map different agricultural practices at scales we never could before.”
In an interview with The Daily, Nishan Bhattarai, the lead author of the study and assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma Norman, said the research will help predict how groundwater depletion levels will change in India in the future.
“Even though it is incredibly hard to predict these levels by 30 to 40 years in the future, our research is showing that there will be an increased demand for groundwater in the next coming decades,” Bhattarai said.
Bhattarai said part of the problem is that a lot of India’s agriculture revolves around rice farming, with the country being the second largest producer of rice worldwide. Because rice-farming is water-intensive, Bhattarai said a possible solution for mitigating the effects of groundwater depletion would be to switch to different crops that would require less irrigation.
“One solution could be to switch rice with other, more efficient crops,” Bhattarai said. “What if farmers switched to crops like millet? Farmers could still benefit from choosing a more water-efficient crop.”
According to Jain, farmers could also keep growing rice, but switch to less water-intensive practices to reduce groundwater depletion rates.
“Another solution would be to use farming practices that use less water,” Jain said. “There are some other strategies such as alternate wetting and drying that farmers can use to grow (rice).”
Daily Staff Reporter Emma Lapp can be reached at emmalapp@umich.edu.
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