A Study on Environmental Flow Requirements in Krishna River Basin

Abstract

Rivers play an important role in the transfer and distribution of water resources from the nature to human society. Globally, the utilisation of water quality is increasing with increasing human population with rapidly developing cities, industries, agriculture and power generation which lead to decreasing the freshwater resources availability. This increase is taking place with limited sources of freshwater. In the past two to three decades, hydrological alterations have affected the ecosystem and caused severe changes in the regime of the rivers. Thus, the protection of environmental instream flows to maintain healthy ecosystems has become more and more critical. Environmental Flows (EF) represent the quality, quantity and duration of water flows needed to maintain the species, functions and resilience of freshwater ecosystems and livelihoods of human communities that depend on healthy ecosystems.