The future thirst of food security: drivers, trade-offs and integrated adaptation strategies for future water and food security in the Indus basin.

Summary

Food production in the densely populated Indus basin depends heavily on irrigation. The high demand for irrigation water causes numerous water scarcity issues and strongly contributes to the basin being one of the most water stressed places in the world. Water and food security in this region are thus highly interdependent, but also negatively affect each other. These trade-offs are expected to intensify under future climatic and socioeconomic changes.

To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for water and food security (SDG2 & SDG6), adaptation strategies are required that balance long-term water management and food production objectives and account for the future impact of climate change. This thesis aims to support adaptation planning in the Indus basin by providing detailed spatial information on drivers, trade-offs and potential integrated adaptation strategies for future water and food security. The results demonstrate principally that socioeconomic changes will rapidly increase the demand for both water and food resources in the future. This will intensify competition for water between agriculture and other water-users, such as the domestic and industrial sector, and between the upstream and downstream.

Meeting the growing food demands under climate change requires irrigated food production to expand and leads to an increase in irrigation water demands. This further intensifies water competition and will therefore strongly exacerbate water scarcity issues. Sustainable limits on irrigation water demand may accommodate these growing water demands of other sectors, but may make food self-sufficiency in the basin unattainable on the long-term. The use of adaptation pathways identified adaptive actions that can combine food production gains with irrigation water savings. Nevertheless, under continued population growth, these mutually beneficial measures are insufficient, and pathways are eventually forced to prioritize either water or food security objectives.

This thesis highlights that technical changes to the food production system and associated water management practices are a powerful mechanism for adaptation planning in the Indus basin. However, ensuring robust progress for the SDGs requires modifications to the food production system to be integrated into broader strategies for sustainable development that can address the adverse trade-offs that such changes may cause. Furthermore, this thesis provides important methodological insights and lessons for future modelling studies in other complex river basins with similar strong linkages between water and food security.