Droughts and floods have pushed the nation’s leaky, polluted, and half-done water systems to the brink.
JAMES Temple------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Apr,24,2019
干旱和洪水将国家的漏水，污染和半完成的水系统推向了边缘。
Severe droughts have drained rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers across vast parts of India in recent years, pushing the nation’s leaky, polluted water systems to the brink.
近年来，严重的干旱使印度大部分地区的河流，水库和含水层枯竭，将该国漏水，污染的水系统推向了边缘。
More than 600 million Indians face “acute water shortages,” according to a report last summer by NITI Aayog, a prominent government think tank. Seventy percent of the nation’s water supply is contaminated, causing an estimated 200,000 deaths a year. Some 21 cities could run out of groundwater as early as next year, including Bangalore and New Delhi, the report found. Forty percent of the population, or more than 500 million people, will have “no access to drinking water” by 2030.
据知情政府智囊机构NITI Aayog去年夏天报道，超过6亿印度人面临“严重的水资源短缺”。 该国70％的供水受到污染，每年造成约20万人死亡。 报告发现，大约21个城市最早可能在明年耗尽地下水，包括班加罗尔和新德里。 到2030年，40％的人口或超过5亿人将“无法获得饮用水”。
India gets more water than it needs in a given year. But the vast majority of rain falls during the summer monsoon season, generally a four-month window. The country’s other major source is melting snow and glaciers from the Himalayan plateau, which feeds rivers in the north.
印度在某一年获得的水量超过了它所需的水量。 但绝大多数降雨都是在夏季季风季节，一般是四个月的周期。 该国的另一个主要来源是喜马拉雅高原的融雪和冰川融化，这些高原为北方的河流提供养料。
Capturing and delivering the water to the right places at the right times across thousands of miles, without wasting or contaminating tremendous amounts along the way, is an enormous engineering challenge. India captures and uses only a fraction of its rainfall, allowing most of it to run off into the ocean.
在数千英里的适当时间捕获并将水输送到正确的位置，而不会浪费或污染大量的水，这是一项巨大的工程挑战。 印度捕获并仅使用其降雨的一小部分，使大部分降雨流入海洋。
Meanwhile, farmers without efficient irrigation systems employ heavily subsidized electricity to suck up as much groundwater as possible. Agriculture is the single largest drain on India’s water supplies, using more than 80% of the water despite accounting for only around 15% of the country’s GDP.
与此同时，没有高效灌溉系统的农民使用大量补贴电力来吸收尽可能多的地下水。 农业是印度供水的最大单一流失，尽管仅占该国国内生产总值的15％左右，但使用了80％以上的水资源。
“This is as alarming as any crisis you can imagine,” says Pankaj Vir Gupta, a Delhi-based architect and professor at the University of Virginia, who helped launch a research effort in 2013 to identify ways to rehabilitate the highly polluted Yamuna River, the primary source of Delhi’s drinking water.
“这与你能想象的任何危机一样惊人，”弗吉尼亚大学德里建筑师和教授Pankaj Vir Gupta说道，他帮助在2013年开展了一项研究工作，以确定修复高污染的亚穆纳河的方法， 德里饮用水的主要来源。
Force multiplier
Climate change will surely make the problem worse. It’s uncertain what role higher temperatures have played in recent droughts, as the climate models have mainly predicted increasingly intense Indian monsoons. But the longer-term forecast is that the extremes will become more extreme, threatening more frequent flooding and longer droughts.
气候变化肯定会使问题变得更糟。 由于气候模型主要预测印度季风日益强烈，因此不确定高温在最近的干旱中起了什么作用。 但长期预测是，极端情况将变得更加极端，威胁更频繁的洪水和更长时间的干旱。
Most climate studies predict that India will get more rain on average in the decades to come, though regional and seasonal patterns will vary sharply. A paper published last year in Geophysical Research Letters found that flash flooding will significantly increase in 78 of the 89 urban areas evaluated if global temperatures rise to 2 ˚C above preindustrial levels. The resulting catastrophes will disproportionately harm India’s poor, who frequently settle along the low-lying floodplains of major cities.
大多数气候研究预测，未来几十年印度将有更多平均降雨，但区域和季节性模式将大幅变化。 去年发表在“地球物理研究快报”上的一篇论文发现，如果全球气温上升到工业化前水平2˚C以上的89个城市地区中，有78个地区的洪水泛滥会显着增加。 由此产生的灾难将严重损害印度的贫困人口，他们经常在主要城市的低洼洪泛区定居。
Sea-level rise threatens to deluge villages and megacities, and poison the water tables, along the subcontinent’s 7,500 kilometers (4,660 miles) of coastline between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
海平面上升可能会淹没村庄和大城市，并使次大陆沿阿拉伯海和孟加拉湾之间7,500公里（4,660英里）的海岸线毒化地下水位。
Finally, climbing temperatures and shrinking snowfall will accelerate the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, the wellspring of major Asian waterways including the Ganges, Indus, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers. In some regions, under high emissions scenarios, glaciers could shrink by as much as half by midcentury and 95% by 2100.
最后，攀登气温和降雪量的减少将加速喜马拉雅冰川的融化，这些冰川是亚洲主要水道的源泉，包括恒河，印度河，长江和黄河。 在一些地区，在高排放情景下，到本世纪中叶，冰川可能减少一半，到2100年减少95％。
Initially the increased runoff will swell rivers, raising the risks of downstream flooding but sending Indians more water. That trend is likely to shift into reverse in the second half of the century, however, shrinking the flow to around 1.9 billion people who live along those rivers. The Ganges basin alone supports 600 million people, provides 12% of the country’s surface water, and accounts for 33% of GDP.
最初增加的径流将使河流膨胀，增加下游洪水的风险，但给印度人带来更多的水。 然而，这种趋势在本世纪下半叶可能会转变为倒退，但这种趋势将减少到居住在这些河流上的大约19亿人口。 仅恒河流域就有6亿人口，占该国地表水的12％，占GDP的33％。
“There are already a lot of stressors on India,” says Navroz Dubash, a professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “But climate change is going to be a force multiplier.”
“印度已经有很多压力源，”新德里政策研究中心教授纳罗兹杜瓦什说。 “但气候变化将成为一股力量倍增器。”
Whether shoddy infrastructure or climate change is to blame for India’s water sources running dry or turning toxic won’t, in the end, much matter in the minds of the victims. And either way, India will need to grapple with present-day disasters and fortify infrastructure for worse dangers to come—all with fewer resources than rich nations and without derailing its economic growth.
无论是劣质的基础设施还是气候变化都要归咎于印度的水源干涸或转向有毒，最终不会成为受害者心中的大问题。 无论哪种方式，印度都需要应对当前的灾难，加强基础设施建设，以减少灾难带来的危险，而不是富裕国家，而且不会破坏经济增长。