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Global climate change has numerous implications for members of mountain communities who feel the impacts in both physical and social dimensions. In the Western Himalayas of India, a majority of residents maintain a livelihood strategy that includes a combination of subsistence or small-scale agriculture, seasonal pastoral migration, male out-migration, and localized natural resource extraction. Particularly under conditions of heavy male outmigration, but throughout the region, mountain women play a key role in providing labor and knowledge related to the management of local natural resources, yet often lack authority in related political and economic decision-making processes. This gap has important implications for addressing the impacts of climate change: while warming temperatures, irregular patterns of precipitation and snowmelt, and changing biological systems present challenges to the viability of these traditional livelihood portfolios throughout the region, mountain women increasingly face new challenges in their roles as household managers that have not adequately been emphasized in larger scale planning for climate change adaptation and mitigation. These challenges are complex in nature, and are shaped not only by gender issues but also interacting factors such as class, caste, ethnicity, and age (among others). In this paper, we review the main arguments behind the discursive gender/climate change nexus, discuss the implications for gendered vulnerabilities and transformation of adaptive capacities in the region, and suggest ways that researchers and policymakers seeking to promote "climate justice" can benefit from the incorporation of gender-based perspectives and frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Himalayan glaciers show large uncertainty regarding their present and future state due to their sensitive reaction towards change in climatic condition. Himalayan glaciers are unique as they are located in tropical, high altitude regions, predominantly valley type and many are covered with debris. The great northern plains of India sustain on the perennial melt of glaciers meeting the water requirements of agriculture, industries, domestic sector even in the months of summer when large tracts of the country go dry. Therefore, it is important to monitor and assess the state of snow and glaciers and to know the sustainability of glaciers in view of changing global scenarios of climate and water security of the nation. Any information pertaining to Himalayan glaciers is normally difficult to be obtained by conventional means due to its harsh weather and rugged terrains. Due to the ecological diversity and geographical vividness, major part of the Indian Himalaya is largely un-investigated. Considering the fact that Himalayan glaciers are situated in a harsh environment, conventional techniques of their study is challenging and difficult both in terms of logistics and finances whereas the satellite remote sensing offers a potential mode for monitoring glaciers in long term. In order to gain an updated overview of the present state of the glacier cover and its changes since the previous inventories, an attempt has been made to generate a new remotesensing-derived glacier inventory on 1:50,000 scale for Bhaga basin (N32°28'19.7" - N33°0'9.9"; E76°56'16.3" - E77°25'23.7") Western Himalaya covering an area of 1695.63 km2. having 231 glaciers and occupying glacierized area of 385.17 ±3.71 km2. ranging from 0.03 km2. to 29.28 km2. Glacier inventory has been carried out using high resolution IRS P6 LISS III data of 2011, ASTER DEM and other ancillary data. Specific measurements of mapped glacier features are the inputs for generating the glacier inventory data sheet with 37 parameters as per the UNESCO/TTS format, 11 additional parameters associated with the de-glaciated valley as per the suggestions of Space Application Center Ahmadabad and 9 newly introduced parameters of present study. The data sheet provides glacier wise details for each glacier on the significant glacier parameters like morphology, dimensions, orientation, elevation, etc. for both the active glacier component as well as the associated de-glaciated valley features. Assessment of recent variation in the glacierized area between 2001 and 2011. Results indicate that 231 glaciers covering an area of 391.56 ±3.76 km2. in 2001 has been reduced to 385.17 ±3.71 km2. in 2011; a loss of 1.63 ±1.0% in glacierized area within a period of 10 years. The present paper brings out the methodology adopted and salient results of the glacier inventory carried out which will help to enrich the existing database required for water resources assessment of the country and also meet the requirements of various researches working on climate change related studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in climate and socio-economic conditions pose a major threat to water security, particularly in the densely populated, agriculture-dependent and rapidly developing country of India. Therefore, for cogent mitigation and adaptation planning, it is important to assess the future evolution of drought hazard, vulnerability and risk. Earlier studies have demonstrated projected drought risk over India on the basis of frequency analysis and/or hazard assessment alone. This study investigates and evaluates the change in projected drought risk under future climatic and socio-economic conditions by combining drought hazard and vulnerability projections at a country-wide scale. A multivariate standardized drought index (MSDI) accounting for concurrent deficits in precipitation and soil moisture is chosen to quantify droughts. Drought vulnerability assessment is carried out combining exposure, adaptive capacity and sensitivity indicators, using a robust multi-criteria decision-making method called the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). In the worst-case scenario for drought hazard (RCP2.6-Far future), there is a projected decrease in the area under high or very high drought hazard classes in the country by approximately 7 %. Further, the worst-case scenario for drought vulnerability (RCP6.0-SSP2-Near future) shows a 33 % rise in the areal extent of high or very high drought vulnerability classes. The western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and western Rajasthan regions are found to be high risk under all scenarios. Bivariate choropleth analysis shows that the projected drought risk is majorly driven by changes in drought vulnerability attributable to societal developments rather than changes in drought hazard resulting from climatic conditions. The present study can aid policy makers, administrators and drought managers in developing decision support systems for efficient drought management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian summer monsoon is an integral part of the global climate system. As its seasonal rainfall plays a crucial role in India's agriculture and shapes many other aspects of life, it affects the livelihood of a fifth of the world's population. It is therefore highly relevant to assess its change under potential future climate change. Global climate models within the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) indicated a consistent increase in monsoon rainfall and its variability under global warming. Since the range of the results of CMIP5 was still large and the confidence in the models was limited due to partly poor representation of observed rainfall, the updates within the latest generation of climate models in CMIP6 are of interest. Here, we analyze 32 models of the latest CMIP6 exercise with regard to their annual mean monsoon rainfall and its variability. All of these models show a substantial increase in June-to-September (JJAS) mean rainfall under unabated climate change (SSP5-8.5) and most do also for the other three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways analyzed (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0). Moreover, the simulation ensemble indicates a linear dependence of rainfall on global mean temperature with a high agreement between the models independent of the SSP if global warming is the dominant forcing of the monsoon dynamics as it is in the 21st century; the multi-model mean for JJAS projects an increase of 0.33 mm d -1 and 5.3 % per kelvin of global warming. This is significantly higher than in the CMIP5 projections. Most models project that the increase will contribute to the precipitation especially in the Himalaya region and to the northeast of the Bay of Bengal, as well as the west coast of India. Interannual variability is found to be increasing in the higher-warming scenarios by almost all models. The CMIP6 simulations largely confirm the findings from CMIP5 models, but show an increased robustness across models with reduced uncertainties and updated magnitudes towards a stronger increase in monsoon rainfall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human migration is both motivated and constrained by a multitude of socioeconomic and environmental factors, including climate-related factors. Climatic factors exert an influence on local and regional population density. Here, we examine the implications of future motivation for humans to migrate by analyzing today's relationships between climatic factors and population density, with all other factors held constant. Such "all other factors held constant" analyses are unlikely to make quantitatively accurate predictions, but the order of magnitude and spatial pattern that come out of such an analysis can be useful when considering the influence of climate change on the possible scale and pattern of future incentives to migrate. Our results indicate that, within decades, climate change may provide hundreds of millions of people with additional incentive to migrate, largely from warm tropical and subtropical countries to cooler temperate countries, with India being the country with the greatest number of people with additional incentive to migrate. These climate-driven incentives would be among the broader constellation of incentives that influence migration decisions. Areas with the highest projected population growth rates tend to be areas that are likely to be most adversely affected by climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the arid regions of water-stressed countries of Asia, groundwater production for irrigated agriculture has led to water-level declines that continue to worsen. For India, China, Pakistan, Iran, and others, it is unrealistic to expect groundwater sustainability in a verifiable sense to emerge. Fragmented governance and the general inability to bring traditional socio-economic tools to bear on reducing groundwater demands have impeded progress to groundwater sustainability. For India and Pakistan, where operational management is at the level of states and provinces, there is no capacity to regulate. Also in both China and India, the tremendous numbers of groundwater users, large and small, confound regulation of groundwater. With business as usual, groundwater-related problems receive insufficient attention, a situation referred to as an "accelerating and invisible groundwater crisis" (Biswas et al., 2017). Another obstacle to sustainability comes from trying to manage something you do not understand. With sustainable management, there are significant burdens in the needed technical know-how, in collecting necessary data, and in funding advanced technologies. Thus, there are risks that Iran, India, and Pakistan will run short of groundwater from over-pumping in some places and will also be adversely affected by global climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A range of palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental evidence suggests the Asian sub-continent experienced phases of arid-humid alterations on centennial and millennial scales during the Holocene, which were set against a backdrop of insolation-driven weakening of the Asian Monsoon system. These oscillations would have affected fluvial regimes on the plains of northwest India, which were occupied by the Bronze Age Indus Civilisation during the mid-Holocene. It has been suggested that a decline in regional river systems contributed to the decline of the Indus at ~4 ka (e.g. Giosan et al., 2012 (PNAS 109, E1688), Singh A. et al., 2017 (Nature Communications 8, 1617). In a recent study Orengo and Petrie (2017, Remote Sensing 9, 735) identify a complex channel network on the Sutlej/Yamuna interfluves, and Durcan et al. (in press, Quaternary International, doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2017.10.012) have highlighted complexity in the response of regional geomorphic systems to climatic/environmental change. Therefore, further work is required to understand the spatial and temporal dynamics of regional hydrological systems in order to assess the importance of changing climatic and environmental conditions in the establishment and decline of the Indus CivilisationThis paper presents luminescence dates from palaeochannel sediments and associated dune deposits on the Ghaggar-Hakra floodplain in northwest India, with particular focus on the area around the Indus site of Rakhigarhi. Rakhigarhi is the largest and potentially most important site in northwest India (Singh R.N. et al., 2010, Man and Environment, 35, 37-53), although its relationship to local and regional fluvial systems is unclear. Reconstructing fluvial activity and palaeoenvironmental variability allows a comparison between the documented archaeological record of the Indus Civilisation and an absolute chronology of regional landscape dynamism. Luminescence dating shows that the fluvial network around Rakhigarhi pre-dates the establishment of the site, and that regionally, there is no simple relationship between documented climatic deterioration and changing fluvial activity. This study presents a new reconstruction of palaeoenvironmental change on the Ghaggar-Hakra floodplain, and provides new insights into the fluvial landscapes occupied by the Indus Civilisation during the Holocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Himalayan Mountains are the source region of one of the world's largest supplies of freshwater. The changes in glacier melt may lead to droughts as well as floods in the Himalayan basins, which are vulnerable to hydrological changes. This study used an integrated glacio-hydrological model, the Glacier and Snow Melt – WASMOD model (GSM-WASMOD), for hydrological projections under 21st century climate change by two ensembles of four global climate models (GCMs) under two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) and two bias-correction methods (i.e., the daily bias correction (DBC) and the local intensity scaling (LOCI)) in order to assess the future hydrological changes in the Himalayan Beas basin up to Pandoh Dam (upper Beas basin). Besides, the glacier extent loss during the 21st century was also investigated as part of the glacio-hydrological modeling as an ensemble simulation. In addition, a high-resolution WRF precipitation dataset suggested much heavier winter precipitation over the high-altitude ungauged area, which was used for precipitation correction in the study. The glacio-hydrological modeling shows that the glacier ablation accounted for about 5 % of the annual total runoff during 1986–2004 in this area. Under climate change, the temperature will increase by 1.8–2.8 ∘ C at the middle of the century (2046–2065), and by 2.3–5.4 ∘ C until the end of the century (2080–2099). It is very likely that the upper Beas basin will get warmer and wetter compared to the historical period. In this study, the glacier extent in the upper Beas basin is projected to decrease over the range of 63 %–87 % by the middle of the century and 89 %–100 % at the end of the century compared to the glacier extent in 2005. This loss in glacier area will in general result in a reduction in glacier discharge in the future, while the future streamflow is most likely to have a slight increase because of the increase in both precipitation and temperature under all the scenarios. However, there is widespread uncertainty regarding the changes in total discharge in the future, including the seasonality and magnitude. In general, the largest increase in river total discharge also has the largest spread. The uncertainty in future hydrological change is not only from GCMs, but also from the bias-correction methods and hydrological modeling. A decrease in discharge is found in July from DBC, while it is opposite for LOCI. Besides, there is a decrease in evaporation in September from DBC, which cannot be seen from LOCI. The study helps to understand the hydrological impacts of climate change in northern India and contributes to stakeholder and policymaker engagement in the management of future water resources in northern India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantifying how land-use change and climate change affect water resources is a challenge in hydrological science. This work aims to quantify how future projections of land-use and climate change might affect the hydrological response of the Upper Ganges river basin in northern India, which experiences monsoon flooding almost every year. Three different sets of modelling experiments were run using the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) land surface model (LSM) and covering the period 2000-2035: in the first set, only climate change is taken into account, and JULES was driven by the CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5) outputs of 21 models, under two representative concentration pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5), whilst land use was held fixed at the year 2010. In the second set, only land-use change is taken into account, and JULES was driven by a time series of 15 future land-use pathways, based on Landsat satellite imagery and the Markov chain simulation, whilst the meteorological boundary conditions were held fixed at years 2000-2005. In the third set, both climate change and land-use change were taken into consideration, as the CMIP5 model outputs were used in conjunction with the 15 future land-use pathways to force JULES. Variations in hydrological variables (stream flow, evapotranspiration and soil moisture) are calculated during the simulation period. Significant changes in the near-future (years 2030-2035) hydrologic fluxes arise under future land-cover and climate change scenarios pointing towards a severe increase in high extremes of flow: the multi-model mean of the 95th percentile of streamflow (Q5) is projected to increase by 63% under the combined land-use and climate change high emissions scenario (RCP8.5). The changes in all examined hydrological components are greater in the combined land-use and climate change experiment. Results are further presented in a water resources context, aiming to address potential implications of climate change and land-use change from a water demand perspective. We conclude that future water demands in the Upper Ganges region for winter months may not be met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To study the imprints of the solar-ENSO-geomagnetic activity on the Indian subcontinent, we have applied singular spectral analysis (SSA) and wavelet analysis to the tree-ring temperature variability record from the Western Himalayas. Other data used in the present study are the solar sunspot number (SSN), geomagnetic indices (aa index), and the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) for the common time period of 1876-2000. Both SSA and wavelet spectral analyses reveal the presence of 5-7-year short-term ENSO variations and the 11-year solar cycle, indicating the possible combined influences of solar-geomagnetic activities and ENSO on the Indian temperature. Another prominent signal corresponding to 33-year periodicity in the tree-ring record suggests the Sun-temperature variability link probably induced by changes in the basic state of the Earth's atmosphere. In order to complement the above findings, we performed a wavelet analysis of SSA reconstructed time series, which agrees well with our earlier results and increases the signal-to-noise ratio, thereby showing the strong influence of solar-geomagnetic activity and ENSO throughout the entire period. The solar flares are considered responsible for causing the atmospheric circulation patterns. The net effect of solar-geomagnetic processes on the temperature record might suggest counteracting influences on shorter (about 5-6-year) and longer (about 11-12-year) timescales. The present analyses suggest that the influence of solar activities on the Indian temperature variability operates in part indirectly through coupling of ENSO on multilateral timescales. The analyses, hence, provide credible evidence of teleconnections of tropical Pacific climatic variability and Indian climate ranging from inter-annual to decadal timescales and also suggest the possible role of exogenic triggering in reorganizing the global Earth-ocean-atmospheric systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daily moderate rainfall events, which constitute a major portion of seasonal summer monsoon rainfall over central India, have decreased significantly during the period 1951 through 2005. On the other hand, mean and extreme near-surface daily temperature during the monsoon season have increased by a maximum of 1-1.5 °C. Using simulations made with a high-resolution regional climate model (RegCM4) and prescribed land cover of years 1950 and 2005, it is demonstrated that part of the changes in moderate rainfall events and temperature have been caused by land-use/land-cover change (LULCC), which is mostly anthropogenic. Model simulations show that the increase in seasonal mean and extreme temperature over central India coincides with the region of decrease in forest and increase in crop cover. Our results also show that LULCC alone causes warming in the extremes of daily mean and maximum temperatures by a maximum of 1-1.2 °C, which is comparable with the observed increasing trend in the extremes. Decrease in forest cover and simultaneous increase in crops not only reduces the evapotranspiration over land and large-scale convective instability, but also contributes toward decrease in moisture convergence through reduced surface roughness. These factors act together in reducing significantly the moderate rainfall events and the amount of rainfall in that category over central India. Additionally, the model simulations are repeated by removing the warming trend in sea surface temperatures over the Indian Ocean. As a result, enhanced warming at the surface and greater decrease in moderate rainfall events over central India compared to the earlier set of simulations are noticed. Results from these additional experiments corroborate our initial findings and confirm the contribution of LULCC in the decrease in moderate rainfall events and increase in daily mean and extreme temperature over India. Therefore, this study demonstrates the important implications of LULCC over India during the monsoon season. Although, the regional climate model helps in better resolving land-atmosphere feedbacks over the Indian region, the inferences do depend on the fidelity of the model in capturing the features of Indian monsoon realistically. It is proposed that similar studies using a suite of climate models will further enrich our understanding about the role of LULCC in the Indian monsoon climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describing the nature and variability of Indian monsoon precipitation is a topic of much debate in the current literature. We suggest the use of a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM), specifically, the logit-normal mixed model, to describe the underlying structure of this complex climatic event. Four GLMM algorithms are described and simulations are performed to vet these algorithms before applying them to the Indian precipitation data. The logit-normal model was applied to light, moderate, and extreme rainfall. Findings indicated that physical constructs were preserved by the models, and random effects were significant in many cases. We also found GLMM estimation methods were sensitive to tuning parameters and assumptions and therefore, recommend use of multiple methods in applications. This work provides a novel use of GLMM and promotes its addition to the gamut of tools for analysis in studying climate phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]