Sustainable Planning of Water and Land Resources in the Munneru River Basin, India

Water, a vital resource, plays a crucial role in supporting human health, ensuring food security, enabling energy production, and sustaining ecosystem services. However, water deficit is the main concern for developing countries caused by a number of factors including finite water supplies, increase in population, and climate change. A sustainable approach to manage the water resources is the optimal distribution of available resources, which recognizes the complex relationships between water systems and the effects they have on the environment, society and economy. In this study, the optimal allocation of land and water resources is carried out across five different sectors such as domestic, agriculture, livestock, industrial, and ecological in an annual time step. Munneru basin is selected as a study area which comes under lower region of the Krishna River Basin, India. Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is used to calculate the water availability. Furthermore, for each administrative unit within the basin, the irrigation water requirements for crops are calculated using the CROPWAT tool. Study incorporates objective functions that take into account both social and economic factors. The multi-objective optimisation function maximizes the usage of water and land resources and optimize benefits from the agricultural sector. To achieve these goals, the Non-dominated Sorted Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) is used. Additionally, multi-criteria decision-making technique, such as Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is used to identify better solutions among the Pareto optimal solutions generated by the NSGA-II. Through the application of advanced optimisation algorithms and decision-making techniques, this study aims to contribute valuable insights to the field of water resource management in India. As this approach represents a crucial tool for sustainable development at the basin level, it provides a solid foundation for further extension to other basins across the globe. Furthermore, this work offers the potential for future research into the impacts of climate change and land use/land cover changes on water allocation over various timeframes, without compromising benefits from agriculture sector.