Change of Land Use/Land Cover on Groundwater Recharge in Malaprabha Catchment, Belagavi, Karnataka, India

Direct and indirect vulnerability of economic sectors to water scarcity: A hotspot analysis of the Indian economy

“…Further, since wood (and related products) is the major component accounted within the Forestry sector, this implies that deforestation (or, loss of vegetation cover for industrial production) is the environmental impact of such resource use. Furthermore, since deforestation is capable of reducing groundwater yields (and other water‐related EGS ) (Paul, Ghosh, & Murtugudde, 2018), it also implies that loss of forest cover for other direct human uses (such as agricultural or dense human settlements), is expected to increase groundwater deficits directly (Bhat, Prajwa, Shetty, Srivastava, & Bhosale, 2018; i Canals et al., 2009; Purandara, Venkatesh, & Chandramohan, 2018) and indirectly (Paul et al., 2018). Though such an assertion of land‐use changes and groundwater deficits calls for a separate dynamic (time‐based) study in the context of India, within the current study additional analysis is attempted in Section 3.3.2 to assess whether forest cover has an inverse correlation with groundwater scarcity.…”

“…Hence, considering the land–water nexus is also important for understanding water scarcity. Since the literature suggests that groundwater recharge is most stable under natural forests (Ghimire, Bruijnzeel, Lubczynski, & Bonel, 2014) and with regional studies in the context of India reporting forest cover as an important factor guiding precipitation (Paul et al., 2018), along with offering higher potential of recharge compared to degraded and agriculture lands (Purandara et al., 2018) and arid states such as Rajasthan (Singh, Dahiphale, Yadav, & Singh, 2018), the regional land–water nexus is explored for the Forestry sector. Further, from a water‐use perspective, rising urbanization is capable of affecting groundwater levels (Bhat et al, 2018), (Ramaswami et al., 2017) while creating additional demand for electricity; therefore, the electricity–water nexus at the state level is also explored in this section.…”