I am Dr. Anil Aryal, a citizen of Nepal currently working as a National Researcher in Water Resource Management at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). I am a hydrologist by profession and academics. I have worked in a multi-cultural environment and multiple countries since 2010. I did my PhD in Integrated Water Resource Management from the University of Yamanashi (UY), Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan (2016-2019) and Master's degree in Water Engineering and Management from the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand (2014-2016). I have more than 15 years of working experience in the field of water resources and climate change in Nepal, Japan, Thailand, and many other countries. In the past, I worked as a postdoc researcher at the University of Yamanashi from 2019 to 2022 and as a Senior Research Specialist at the Asian Institute of Technology from 2022 to 2023. Before that, I worked as a Civil Engineer and Lecturer for various other positions and organizations in Nepal. I completed a Bachelor degree in Civil Engineering from Nepal Engineering College (nec), Pokhara University (2006-2010).
This research aims to improve local expertise on climate resilient, inclusive, and sustainable Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) by producing evidence-based data and information, and ensuring their outreach, accessibility and use by local stakeholders, especially local governments in Dailekh and Sarlahi districts. This evidence and knowledge base will be used to plan, design, and implement approaches to strengthening capacity of key local actors, who can influence the planning, design, and delivery of more inclusive and climate-resilient WASH. The specific objectives are:
With climate change, concern about water security has been raised among the scientific and policy community. South Asia, where the Water Tower of Asia is located, home to the world’s 1/4th population is always under water scarcity. This is exacerbated by climate change and a lack of sufficient water storage infrastructures. In this project, we aim to map the water storage that is located in the South Asian countries viz, Nepal, India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. A cohort of experts from academia, government, research centers, and like-minded groups is formed to discuss and map the potential water storage in each country. By now, we have mapped the surface water storage in each country using a remote sensing approach and are in the process of validation.
The project aims to evaluate the rainfall extremes to examine the socioenvironmental challenges in the world’s largest man-made reservoir Volta River Basin (VRB) in West Africa using the long-term reanalysis data. Results of the research show that decreasing frequency of rainfall events has led to environmental challenges like droughts while the increasing rainfall intensity is responsible for flood like environmental issues. Frequent occurrence of the series of floods and drought has led the social issues like poverty (+5%) and water-food insecurity (+15%). The increasing trend of dry years and decreasing trend of the wet years is projected to affect the irrigation productivity and the hydropower production. Further, with increase in the dry events in the basin, climate adaptive measures need to be addressed to minimize the climate related hazards.
The inter relationship among water, energy and food is a key to achieving sustainable development goals and addressing the socio-economic-environmental challenges. With the increment in the supply of irrigation water, the crop yield is expected to increase by 83% for wheat crop and 16.3% for paddy crop at lower Bagmati River Basin (BRB). Similarly, for the upper and mid BRB the crop yield increased by 124.4%, and 165.8% for wheat crop respectively. For the paddy, crop yield increased by 81.8% and 32.6% for paddy at upper and mid BRB respectively. The revenue generated with the sale of energy is estimated to be ranging from 1.4 billion to 72.5 billion NRs while with the sale of the yielded crops at the different rate of consumption the revenue generation ranges from 25.8 to 45.2 billion NRs. The integration of water-energy-food nexus would be important in developing agricultural and landuse modeling and develop strategies to explore fundamental basin of food & energy supply for sustainable future. In addition, an appropriate nexus model would support in deriving balanced water ecosystem under different climate scenarios.
The research on climate extremes conducted at Babai River Basin (BaRB) for both historical time series (1986-2014) and future time series (2020-2100) using climate models from CMIP5 shows that the basin has two major zones regarding the water availability. The East zone is having abundant amount of water compared to the West zone. This can raise water conflict within the basin and have substantial challenges in managing the water resources among the stakeholders. With the high rainfall, the basin received large floods periodically and small floods annually. To minimize the consequence of floods in the basin, integration of structural and non-structural adaptive ways is suggested. Analysis of monthly low flows (median flow) for both pre-(1990-2000) and post-(2001-2009) impact period shows during the high season flow (July – October) flow is more during pre-impact period compared to post-impact period resulting environmental issues like flood, landslide, soil erosivity, etc. Result of the coefficient of dispersion (CD) shows, for the post impact period the dispersion is higher compared to the pre-impact period during the high flow season.
The research is carried out to project the future land use and land cover using the land projection model at Pokhara and Dharan in Nepal and estimation of potential groundwater Recharge area under climatic and land cover change conditions. The temporal projection showed an increasing nature of the agriculture and built-up area, with the reduction of the forest area. The forest area is expected to drop to approx. 10000 Ha from 15000 Ha of land. The built-up area was estimated to increase by 2000 Ha in 30 years. In the year 2020, the forest was converted to agriculture, which increased in the years 2030, 2040, and 2050. Built-up land use type was projected to increase by 16.91% (3760.29 Ha) in 2030, 33.82% (4304.16 Ha) in 2040 and 50.73% (4848.03 Ha) in 2050. Similarly, the reduction in forests were projected to occur by -9.85%, -19.69% and -29.54% in the years 2030, 2040, and 2050, respectively. The conversion of land use type from forest to agriculture was more pronounced during 2040 and 2050. The increase in the agricultural land in this region was found to occur by +10%, +15.52%, and +17.5% in the years 2030, 2040, and 2050 respectively,y with respect to 2020 (current period). Only 10% and 5% of the very high groundwater recharge area was found in 2030 and 2040, respectively, in the southern area, whereas no areas were projected with very high recharge capacity in 2050 in Pokhara.