Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Water Resources in the Indus Basin, Pakistan: A Remote Sensing and Hydrological Modeling Approach Field: Environmental Hydrology and Water Resources Management

Abstract

Water resources in the Indus Basin — the foundation of Pakistan's agriculture, hydropower generation, and domestic water supply — are increasingly affected by climate-driven shifts in temperature, precipitation, and cryospheric dynamics. This paper develops and presents an integrated remote sensing and hydrological modeling framework for quantifying climate change impacts on Indus Basin water resources over the period 2000–2020, with projections extending to 2050 under multiple emissions scenarios. The framework combines satellite-derived indicators of snow-covered area and glacier extent (from MODIS and Landsat imagery), land-use/land-cover change detection, gridded and reanalysis climate datasets, and a physically based, semi-distributed hydrological model (SWAT) calibrated against observed streamflow. The paper synthesizes the current body of published evidence on Upper Indus Basin cryospheric change, precipitation variability, streamflow trends, and groundwater depletion, and situates these findings within the basin's agricultural, hydropower, and transboundary governance context under the Indus Waters Treaty. It further develops a structured framework — with defined datasets, model parameterization steps, statistical trend-testing procedures (e.g., Mann-Kendall, Sen's slope), and validation metrics (Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency, R², percent bias) — for generating basin-specific, data-driven projections of future water availability. Reservoir operation optimization, managed groundwater recharge, and climate-resilient agricultural practices are identified from the literature as priority adaptation strategies. This manuscript presents the conceptual, methodological, and literature-synthesis foundation of the study; primary numerical outputs (e.g., basin-specific glacier area change, streamflow trend magnitudes, and future discharge projections) require completion of the satellite data processing and hydrological model calibration steps described in Sections 3 and 4, and are not yet available for reporting.