Irrigation efficiency and water-policy implications for river basin resilience

By Christopher A. Scott, S. Vicuña, Irene Blanco-Gutiérrez, Francisco Javier Meza, Consuelo Varela-Ortega. 2013

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rising demand for food, fiber, and biofuels drives expanding irrigation withdrawals from surface water and groundwater. Irrigation efficiency and water savings have become watchwords in response to climate-induced hydrological variability, increasing freshwater demand for other uses including ecosystem water needs, and low economic productivity of irrigation compared to most other uses. We identify three classes of unintended consequences, presented here as paradoxes. Ever-tighter cycling of water has been shown to increase resource use, an example of the efficiency paradox . In the absence of effective policy to constrain irrigated-area expansion using "saved water", efficiency can aggravate scarcity, deteriorate resource quality, and impair river basin resilience through loss of flexibility and redundancy. Water scarcity and salinity effects in the lower reaches of basins (symptomatic of the scale paradox ) may partly be offset over the short-term through groundwater pumping or increasing surface water storage capacity. However, declining ecological flows and increasing salinity have important implications for riparian and estuarine ecosystems and for non-irrigation human uses of water including urban supply and energy generation, examples of the sectoral paradox . This paper briefly considers three regional contexts with broadly similar climatic and water-resource conditions – central Chile, southwestern US, and south-central Spain – where irrigation efficiency directly influences basin resilience. The comparison leads to more generic insights on water policy in relation to irrigation efficiency and emerging or overdue needs for environmental protection.

Subfields: Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b306caec5c3b18c2e58cfea30da0cf42e92d076

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ocean Engineering

In Water Science and Technology

Citations in the corpus

The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Enhancing Adaptive Capacity to Complex Global Challenges (2015, background): “…to engage directly in debates over the securitization of resources (Zeitoun et al. 2013; Fischhendler and Katz 2012; Mollinga et al. 2012), but instead to relate the nexus to the more benign human and ecosystem dependence dimensions of resource security (e.g. Scott et al. 2013 for water security).”
The Global Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus (2018, background): “Unless policies limit the extent of the irrigated land, what typically happens is that more land is irrigated and water-resource availability decreases, which may exacerbate water scarcity and soil salinity problems (Scott et al., 2014).”