The impacts of climate change on water resources of Fitzroy River and Tigris Rivers Basins and identification of adaptation measures

Abstract

Australia and Northeast Iraq have scarce water resources which are vulnerable to climate change. Analyses of historical data have revealed that these two regions are experiencing climate change to a degree higher than generally reported elsewhere. To date the relationship between climate change and its effect on water resources of Australia and Northeast Iraq has been sparsely addressed in the published literature, and almost no attention has been paid to climate change-related water resources issues. In order to fill that gap, this research work first investigates if there has been a significant change in climate in these two regions, and this has been found to be true. The relationship between climate change and its impact on water resources is explored through the application of the widely used ‘white box’ model SWAT. The model depicts the availability of water resources, classified separately as blue and green waters, for short-term and distant futures for the two regions. Some of the findings are foreboding and warrant urgent attention of planners and decision makers for certain places where (in both regions) the results show that climate change will have major impacts on water resources. The Fitzroy River Basin will experience hotter and wetter weather, while the Iraqi Basin will see hotter and drier weather in the near and distant futures, near being up to 2046-2064 and distant being up to 2080-2100. The research makes some projections of future water resource distributions in the two regions based on climatic scenarios from some widely used General Circulation Model (GCM) ensembles. The research further investigates how the population is adapting to already changed climates and how it is expected to cope in the future when the shift in climate is expected to be much greater