Research Information System
Sustainable Water Resources Management, vol.11, no.5, 2025 (ESCI)
Land use land cover (LULC) and climate change impact studies hold utmost importance for efficient and sustainable management of water resources of a basin. Land use dynamics along with the climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions alter the hydrological response of a river basin. The present study focuses on quantifying the combined impact of LULC and climate change on the water balance components of the Jhelum River basin using soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) hydrological model. SWAT-CUP (SUFI-2 algorithm) was employed to calibrate and validate the model using Nash–Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) as the objective function. Model performance was evaluated using statistical parameters like R2, NSE, PBIAS and KGE. Future projections of climate change using bias corrected NorESM1-M model have also been utilized in this study under medium emission RCP 4.5 and high emission RCP 8.5 radiative forcing to estimate the changes in mean annual temperature and precipitation during mid (2041–2070) and end of the twenty-first century (2071–2100) in the Jhelum River basin. Moreover, projected future hydrological response of the basin as a result of this climate change has been quantified in terms of the changes exhibited by the water balance components of the basin using SWAT model.