Climate Variability and Change—Hydrological Impacts (Proceedings of the Fifth FRIEND World Conference held at Havana, Cuba, November 2006), IAHS Publ. 308, 2006, 389–393.

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Exploring the impacts of climate change on water resources—regional impacts at a regional scale: Bangladesh

CHAK FAI FUNG¹, FRANCIS FARQUHARSON¹ & Jahir Chowdhury²

1 Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, Oxfordshire OX10 8BB, UK

cffu@ceh.ac.uk

2 Institute of Water and Flood Management, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract Bangladesh is located at the confluence of three major river basins: the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna (GBM) basins. The GWAVA (Global Water AVailability Assessment) model, a global-scale gridded approach to hydrological modelling, has been applied to all GBM basins to investigate the impacts of climate change on water resources at a regional scale. The entire model set-up is composed of a coarse-scale GBM-wide model at 0.5 degrees resolution and a fine-scale model at 0.1 degrees representing Bangladesh. A suite of climate scenarios have been collated from regional climate data using the Hadley Centre’s HadRM2 and that generated by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology using the Hadley Centre’s PRECIS. Scenarios for water demands have been developed for the present and future based on socio-economic data from various publicly available sources and local water management plans. The comparison of water demands with supply using spatial-temporal distributed water availability indices enables areas of future scarcity to be identified.

Key words water resources modelling; climate change; impacts study; grid-based models; water demand; water scarcity; regional climate models

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