Место издания:Nova Science Publishers, Inc New York
Первая страница:51
Последняя страница:87
Аннотация:The Aral Sea basin is one of the most anthropogenically modified areas of the world; it is also a zone of a water-related ecological crisis. We concentrate on studying water security of five countries in the region: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. These countries share the same recent history of being a part of the Soviet Union, and inherit their water regulation from the planned economy of that time that was targeted at maximizing agricultural output through diverting the river flow into an extensive and largely ineffective network of irrigation canals. The current water crisis is largely due to human activity; however the region is also strongly impacted by the climate. Climate change will contribute to water problems, escalating irrigation demand during the drought period, and increasing water loss with evaporation. The future of the countries of the Aral Sea basin then depends on both the regional scenario of water management policy and a global scenario of climate change, and is integrated with global socioeconomic scenarios. We formulate a set of regional policy scenarios (“Business as Usual”, “Falling Behind” and “Closing the Gap”) and demonstrate how each of them corresponds to IPCC SRES scenarios, the latter used as an input to the General Circulation Models (GCMs). Then we discuss the relative effectiveness of the introduced scenarios for mitigating water problems in the region, taking into account the adaptation through changing water demand for agriculture. Finally, we introduce the results of multimodel analysis of GCM climate projections, especially in relation to the change in precipitation and frequency of droughts, and discuss the impact of climate change on future development of the region.