Drivers of water conflicts in co-evolving human-water systems in Cauvery Basin, Southern India

 

​India is a rapidly evolving economy with rising demands from various sectors and stakeholders including the environment.  Water conflicts emerge when mechanisms to allocate water between different sectors do not keep up with changing demands. 

 

Because biophysical drivers of water availability such as industrialization, urbanization, and deforestation are driven by humans - integration of underlying socio-economic drivers with bio-physical in is, therefore, understanding water conflicts requires a socio-hydrological approach.

 

In an attempt to understand this dynamism of human-water interactions within the landscape and improve the emergence of water conflicts, we present the case of the Cauvery basin -- a highly contentious inter-state river basin in Southern India. Over a two-decade period, we explore how catchments have co-evolved by studying signatures of 53 watersheds in Cauvery basin and correlate it to the occurrence of conflict in print media. Using spatiotemporal cluster statistical analyses tools like principal component analysis in R, we explore how changes in the landscape have triggered water conflicts.