Divergent path: isolating land use and climate change impact on river runoff

Water resource management requires a thorough examination of how land use and climate change affect streamflow; however, the potential impacts of land-use changes are frequently ignored. Therefore, the principal goal of this study is to isolate the effects of anticipated climate and land-use changes on streamflow at the Indus River, Besham, Pakistan, using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The multimodal ensemble (MME) of 11 general circulation models (GCMs) under two shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) 245 and 585 was computed using the Taylor skill score (TSS) and rating metric (RM). Future land use was predicted using the cellular automata artificial neural network (CA-ANN). The impacts of climate change and land-use change were assessed on streamflow under various SSPs and land-use scenarios. To calibrate and validate the SWAT model, the historical record (1991–2013) was divided into the following two parts: calibration (1991–2006) and validation (2007–2013). The SWAT model performed well in simulating streamflow with NSE, R², and RSR values during the calibration and validation phases, which are 0.77, 0.79, and 0.48 and 0.76, 0.78, and 0.49, respectively. The results show that climate change (97.47%) has a greater effect on river runoff than land-use change (2.53%). Moreover, the impact of SSP585 (5.84%–19.42%) is higher than that of SSP245 (1.58%–4%). The computed impacts of climate and land-use changes are recommended to be incorporated into water policies to bring sustainability to the water environment.