How Sustainable is the Increase in the Water Footprint of the Spanish Agricultural Sector? A Provincial Analysis between 1955 and 2005–2010

Cazcarro, Ignacio; Duarte, Rosa; Martín-Retortillo, Miguel; Pinilla, Vicente; Mamolar, Ana Serrano

doi:10.3390/su7055094

Cited by 41 publications

(31 citation statements)

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“…Agriculture and agri-food are also some of those sectors more investigated by the literature and characterized by the availability of several case studies. Cazcarro et al [10] analyzed the provincial variation of WF and its sustainability in Spain, considering a time lapse of 50 years and referring to the agricultural sector 8. Flores-Lopez and Bautista-Capetillo [11] estimated green and blue WFs for dry beans in the dry beans primary region of Mexico, both under irrigation and dryland conditions, using standard methodology.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Water Footprint of the Wine Industry: Implementation of an Assessment Methodology and Application to a Case Study

et al. 2015

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An original methodology for the Water Footprint Assessment (WFA) of a Product for the wine-making industry sector is presented, with a particular focus on the evaluation procedure of the grey water. Results obtained with the proposed methodology are also presented for an Italian case study. The product was analyzed using a life-cycle approach, with the aim of studying the water volumes of each phase according to the newly-released ISO 14046 international standard. The functional unit chosen in this study is the common 0.75 liter wine bottle. An in-house software (V.I.V.A.) was implemented with the goal of accounting for all the contributions in a cradle-to-grave approach. At this stage, however, minor water volumes associated with some foreground and background processes are not assessed. The evaluation procedure was applied to a case study and green, blue, and grey water volumes were computed. Primary data were collected for a red wine produced by an Umbrian wine-making company. Results are in accordance with global average water footprint values from literature, showing a total WF of 632.2 L/bottle, with the major contribution (98.3%) given by green water, and minor contributions (1.2% and 0.5%) given by grey and blue water, respectively. A particular effort was dedicated to the definition of an improved methodology for the assessment of the virtual water volume required to dilute the load of pollutants on the environment below some reference level (Grey WF). The improved methodology was elaborated to assure the completeness of the OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2015, 7 12191 water footprint assessment and to overcome some limitations of the reference approach. As a result, the overall WF can increase up to 3% in the most conservative hypotheses.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Water Footprint of the Wine Industry: Implementation of an Assessment Methodology and Application to a Case Study

et al. 2015

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“…In Spain, the relative good climatic conditions (sunshine hours, mild temperatures, etc. ), despite the associated aridity, and the hydraulic infrastructure to store and distribute water resources have also favored the development of the agri-food system [40,41] involving pressures on water.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Income, Economic Structure and Trade: Impacts on Recent Water Use Trends in the European Union

2018

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From the mid-1990s to the recent international economic crisis, the European Union (EU27) experienced a significant economic growth and a flat population increase. During these years, the water resources directly used by the EU countries displayed a growing but smooth trend. However, European activities intensively demanded water resources throughout the whole global supply chain. The growth rate of embodied water use was three times higher than the growth in water directly used by these economies. This was mainly due to the large upsurge of virtual water imports in the EU (e.g., about 25% of the change in water imports in the world was directly linked to the increasing imports in the EU27 countries). In this context, we analyze water use changes in the EU27 from 1995 to 2009, combining the production and consumption perspectives. To that aim, we use the environmentally extended input-output approach to obtain the volume of water embodied in domestic production and in trade flows at the sector and country levels. In the empirical analysis, we utilize multi-regional input-output data from the World Input Output Database. In addition, by means of a structural decomposition analysis we identify and quantify the factors explaining changes in these trends. We focus both on the role of domestic production and trade and estimate the associated intensity, technology and scale effects. This analysis is done for different clusters, identifying singular patterns depending on income criteria. Our results confirm the boost of demand growth in that period, the positive but negligible effect of structural change, and the decline in water intensity which, however, was not enough to compensate the effects on water associated to the economic expansion in the period. These findings also point at a gradual substitution of domestic water use for virtual water imports. More concretely, in most countries the food industry tended to reduce its backward linkages with the domestic agricultural sector, increasing the embodied water in agricultural imports from non-European regions.

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“…In Spain, for example, these products include rice, oranges, olives, mandarins, apricots, and grapes. The biggest water problems occur in the southern part of the country, in the Guadiana and Guadalquivir river basins (Cazcarro et al, 2015). Some farmers do far better than others, but discriminating in trade between sustainable and unsustainable products is problematic.…”

Section: Product Transparency Versus Nondiscrimination In Tradementioning

confidence: 99%

Global Food Trade and Local Water Resources

Hoekstra

2018

The Oxford Handbook of Food, Water and Society

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Given that food production requires a lot of water, more than any other economic sector, one would expect that the world’s food production concentrates in places where water is relatively abundant. This chapter, however, highlights the paradox that various water-poor countries produce food for export to water-rich countries. Food commodity prices do not reflect the cost of water inputs or of damaged water ecosystems, so that the global food market lacks economic incentives to source from places with less harmful impacts on local water systems. The costs of ‘traded’ embedded water thus remain invisible. The chapter proposes an international water label for water-intensive products and argues that international trade rules should include regulations on sustainable water use.

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How Sustainable is the Increase in the Water Footprint of the Spanish Agricultural Sector? A Provincial Analysis between 1955 and 2005–2010

Cited by 41 publications

References 41 publications

The Water Footprint of the Wine Industry: Implementation of an Assessment Methodology and Application to a Case Study

The Water Footprint of the Wine Industry: Implementation of an Assessment Methodology and Application to a Case Study

Income, Economic Structure and Trade: Impacts on Recent Water Use Trends in the European Union

Global Food Trade and Local Water Resources

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