This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: An estimated 6 billion liters (1.6 billion gallons) of untreated sewage is discharged daily into the Ganges River Basin, home to 650 million people. Combined with seasonal monsoon flooding, the sewage and other pollutants, including agricultural runoff and industrial waste, create a major threat to public health.
In a new Yale-led study, researchers developed an analytical model to identify areas along a 1,330-kilometer-long (826 miles) and 20-kilometer-wide (12 miles) corridor of the river basin that are most vulnerable to pollution. They found that urban areas on the river have the highest vulnerability. The model, a novel method for visualizing pollution vulnerability, can help policymakers and landscape designers prioritize conservation and pollution-control efforts and target interventions, such as infrastructure upgrades or conservation zoning, to sites on the river where they will have the greatest effect, the researchers said.
"Good data is vital to protecting and rejuvenating the Ganges River Basin," said Anthony Acciavatti, the Diana Balmori Associate Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and the study's lead author. "It's not enough to identify the sources of pollution; we need data on where to target interventions and on what kinds of interventions are needed. Our model can guide these kinds of decisions." The study was published in the journal PLOS Water.
Acciavatti and his co-authors are members of the Ganges Lab of Collaborative Earth, a nonprofit organization that brings together scientists, engineers and other experts to develop practical solutions to environmental problems that improve the well-being of local communities. The study area for the new research spans Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state and a patchwork of urban and agricultural landscapes that is home to 235 million people. The analysis covered 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) on either side of the Ganges River and encompassed about 26,600 square kilometers.
For the study, the researchers used the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multicriteria method that weighs multiple factors according to their relative importance. This process, when coupled with remote sensing and geospatial data, supports the analysis of large environmental systems, according to the researchers. In this case, the model was used to assess six factors that affect vulnerability to pollution: the region's population density; land use and land cover; average rainfall; drainage density; topographic slope; and average temperature.
The AHP model classified about 84% of the study area as having low vulnerability, while 3.5% of the corridor, concentrated around urban areas, was determined to be highly vulnerable. The most vulnerable locations were cities located on the banks of the river, such as Varanasi, Prayagraj and Kanpur. By contrast, the model found that forested and agricultural landscapes with relatively low population densities were less vulnerable to pollution.
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