The main causes of decreasing water levels in the Kura River

Abstract

Declining water levels are a growing concern in many river basins because they affect water security, agriculture, ecosystems and economic activity. This article develops an original student research project on the main causes of decreasing water levels and applies its causal framework to the Kura River. The source project identified climate change, drought, reduced rainfall, rising temperatures, excessive water use, population growth, pollution and poor water management as the principal drivers of water shortage. The present study preserves those themes and strengthens them through a structured narrative review of hydrological, water-quality and management literature relevant to the Kura Basin. The evidence shows that declining water availability cannot be explained by one factor alone. Climatic variability and warming can change runoff timing and increase evaporative demand; irrigation and other withdrawals can intensify low-flow stress; reservoirs redistribute water across seasons; and infrastructure losses can increase the volume that must be abstracted to meet demand. Water-quality deterioration does not necessarily reduce physical discharge, but it can reduce the amount of water suitable for particular uses and therefore worsen effective scarcity. The article links these pressures to agricultural productivity, ecosystem resilience and green-economic performance. It concludes that improving Kura River water security requires integrated monitoring, efficient irrigation, abstraction control, wastewater treatment, reservoir coordination, ecosystem restoration and public water-conservation awareness. Future research should combine long-term discharge records with climate, withdrawal, storage and water-quality data so that the relative contribution of each pressure can be quantified more reliably.