Global agricultural economic water scarcity
By L. Rosa, D. Chiarelli, Maria Cristina Rulli, J. Dell’Angelo, Paolo D'Odorico. Science Advances, 2020
623 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We advance the notion of agricultural economic water scarcity to identify where irrigation expansion may increase food production. Water scarcity raises major concerns on the sustainable future of humanity and the conservation of important ecosystem functions. To meet the increasing food demand without expanding cultivated areas, agriculture will likely need to introduce irrigation in croplands that are currently rain-fed but where enough water would be available for irrigation. “Agricultural economic water scarcity” is, here, defined as lack of irrigation due to limited institutional and economic capacity instead of hydrologic constraints. To date, the location and productivity potential of economically water scarce croplands remain unknown. We develop a monthly agrohydrological analysis to map agricultural regions affected by agricultural economic water scarcity. We find these regions account for up to 25% of the global croplands, mostly across Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. Sustainable irrigation of economically water scarce croplands could feed an additional 840 million people while preventing further aggravation of blue water scarcity.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d66b990a626d6f31651920173625c793bb96f6d9
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Ocean Engineering
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Citations in the corpus
- Global food self-sufficiency in the 21st century under sustainable intensification of agriculture (2020, background): “Hence, by sustainably expanding irrigation onto rain-fed croplands in locations where sustainable irrigation is deemed feasible (Rosa et al 2018, 2020), crop production and food availability can be increased without incurring in the environmental impacts arising from the expansion of the land…”