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Melting mountain glaciers reduce water resources in Central Asia
Climate change impacts every glacier in the world, including mountain glaciers.
As a result, large glaciers reduce in size, while the smaller ones might vanish altogether.
In many regions the glaciers, including mountain glaciers, -
have a significant role in the local water balance and water resources.
Melting glaciers could substantially shake the water balance and consequently cause new problems, -
which is the current situation in Central Asia.
What research methods did you use?
We used five global climate models and their projections about how -
the temperatures and precipitation will change in the coming decades.
Based on the models, we could calculate what would happen to the glaciers and evaporation in the future, -
and then we were able to estimate how much water will be available in Central Asia in the future.
What kinds of results did your research yield?
These graphs summarise the key findings of our research.
In short, these two graphs illustrate the water demand in the basins of the two most important rivers in Central Asia, -
or the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers.
This graphs illustrates three time periods: -
2001-2010, which represents the current conditions, -
as well as two future ten-year time periods.
The vertical axis represents the demand for water, -
while the blue bar illustrates how many millions of cubic metres of water is needed -
for example in agriculture and domestic use and so forth.
The red bar, in turn, illustrates how much of the total water demand is unmet.
As we can see, the red bar gets longer as we go further into the future.
In other words, an increasing portion of the water demand goes unmet.
Simply put, this situation will only get worse due to climate change.
How can these results be utilised in the future?
There are already political tensions between the nations in Central Asia.
These tensions stem mostly from disputes in the control of the water resources.
Since water scarcity is expected to increase in the future, -
studies like these are important because they provide background information -
that can be used in preparing the best adaptation measures.
Hopefully, studies like these could also help alleviate the situation in the area, -
so that the tensions between the nations would not escalate into anything worse.