| Résumé
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Afghanistan is
a semi-arid
and mountainous country which faced three decades of conflict. It is
one of the
most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change as it has very
limited
capacity to address the impacts of climate change. It has been also
considered
as a data-scarce region both temporally and spatially with limited
capability
to measure hydro-meteorological parameters with in situ gauges. The
current
study focuses on Kabul basin which lies
in the
northeast quarter of Afghanistan.
It accounts for thirty-five percent of the population’s water supply,
and has
the fastest population growth rate in the country. The main objective
of this
study is to understand the impacts of climate change on water resources
and
agriculture. To understand the impact on water resource, first of all,
the
performance evaluation of global datasets/remote sensed products is
investigated in order to generate precipitation and temperature
datasets for
baseline period of climate change studies and developing hydrological
model.
Then a hydrological model is selected to understand hydrologic response
of the Kabul
basin and future projections
of water availability using future climate projections. To understand
the
impact on agriculture, a study on farmers’ perception about climate
change and
its impacts on their agriculture is undertaken. Secondly, a crop model
is used
to evaluate the impacts of climate change on wheat yield.
This study
recommends that
the future projections of temperature and precipitation are highly
uncertain
and policy makers should include a range of projections while making
the decisions
for development plans and adaptation strategies. Temperature is
projected to
increase in future for the study area but the results suggest that it
might
create further opportunities due to increase in the water availability
and
decrease in the cold temperature stress for the crops. However, lack of
infrastructure might lead to further problems due to the possibility of
more
frequent and extreme floods and droughts. This study can be used as an
outline
for other river basins in Afghanistan.
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