Lost in translation? Water efficiency in Spanish agriculture

López-Gunn, Elena; Zorrilla, Pedro; Prieto, F.; Llamas, M. Ramón

doi:10.1016/j.agwat.2012.01.005

Cited by 111 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…In Spain, as in many other arid and semi-arid regions, irrigated agriculture is responsible for most consumptive water use and plays an important role in sustaining rural livelihoods (Lopez-Gunn et al, 2012;Várela-Ortega, 2007). Historically, publicly-funded irrigation development plans promoted irrigation expansión and economic growth in agrarian Spain, but increased environmental damage and led to excessive and inefficient exploitation of water resources, raising serious questions over the environmental and economic sustainability of irrigated systems (Várela-Ortega, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrated assessment of policy interventions for promoting sustainable irrigation in semi-arid environments: A hydro-economic modeling approach

Ferrer

Varela‐Ortega

Purkey

2013

Journal of Environmental Management

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Keywords:Water management Sustainable irrigation Hydro-economic modeling Policy analysis Semi-arid regions Sustaining irrigated agriculture to meet food production needs while maintaining aquatic ecosystems is at the heart of many policy debates in various parts of the world, especially in arid and semi-arid áreas. Researchers and practitioners are increasingly calling for integrated approaches, and policy-makers are progressively supporting the inclusión of ecological and social aspects in water management programs. This paper contributes to this policy debate by providing an integrated economic-hydrologic modeling framework that captures the socio-economic and environmental effects of various policy initiatives and climate variability. This modeling integration includes a risk-based economic optimization model and a hydrologic water management simulation model that have been specified for the Middle Guadiana basin, a vulnerable drought-prone agro-ecological área with highly regulated river systems in southwest Spain. Namely, two key water policy interventions were investigated: the implementation of mínimum environmental ñows (supported by the European Water Framework Directive, EU WFD), and a reduction in the legal amount of water delivered for irrigation (planned measure included in the new Guadiana River Basin Management Plan, GRBMP, still under discussion). Results indícate that current patterns of excessive water use for irrigation in the basin may put environmental ñow demands at risk, jeopardizing the WFD's goal of restoring the 'good ecological status' of water bodies by 2015. Conñicts between environmental and agricultural water uses will be stressed during prolonged dry episodes, and particularly in summer low-ñow periods, when there is an important increase of crop irrigation water requirements. Securing mínimum stream ñows would entail a substantial reduction in irrigation water use for rice cultivation, which might affect the profitability and economic viability of small rice-growing farms located upstream in the river. The new GRBMP could contribute to balance competing water demands in the basin and to increase economic water productivity, but might not be sufficient to ensure the provisión of environmental ñows as required by the WFD. A thoroughly revisión of the basin's water use concession system for irrigation seems to be needed in order to bring the GRBMP in Une with the WFD objectives. Furthermore, the study illustrates that social, economic, institutional, and technological factors, in addition to bio-physical conditions, are important issues to be considered for designing and developing water management strategies. The research initiative presented in this paper demonstrates that hydro-economic models can explicitly intégrate all these issues, constituting a valuable tool that could assist policy makers for implementing sustainable irrigation policies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrated assessment of policy interventions for promoting sustainable irrigation in semi-arid environments: A hydro-economic modeling approach

Ferrer

Varela‐Ortega

Purkey

2013

Journal of Environmental Management

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“…In fact, although the National Irrigation Modernization Plan put into practice the existing resource saving technical alternatives, water governance and institutional capacity were not improved accordingly. As a result, the potential for water saving through the development of more efficient irrigation devices was largely used to increase the irrigated area [42], thus showing no positive impact on IWP (nor in DWP).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, Drought Management Plans have been often criticized because they do not address the incentives behind increasing water demand [46]. Also, technical alternatives such as the National Irrigation Modernization Plan have been explored and implemented in the CL Region, although with disappointing results: in this case, the opportunity to save water from the enhanced technical efficiency was largely used to increase the irrigated surface [42,47].This is coherent with the findings obtained elsewhere by [8,48,49]. This is not to say that technical improvements should be disregarded: there is still significant leeway for further savings if best available technologies are used.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Input-Output Assessment of Water Productivity in the Castile and León Region (Spain)

Pérez-Blanco

Thaler

2014

Water

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Abstract:The failure in the past to acknowledge the limits of water supply and to decouple economic development from water demand has resulted in a water dependent growth model currently threatened by increasing scarcity and droughts. Consequently, there is now an urgent need to use sparse water resources in a more sustainable and efficient way. This demands a comprehensive understanding of water productivity and the linkages among economic sectors to illustrate the tradeoffs in water reallocations from productive sectors to priority uses (household and urban uses). This paper develops a methodology based on the Hypothetical Extraction Method to estimate inter-temporal direct and indirect water productivity. The method is applied to the Spanish region of Castile and León. Results confirm the existence of a relevant water productivity gap between the agriculture (the largest water consumer) and that of the other sectors, which are nonetheless largely dependent on the agricultural output (and thus, on agricultural water demand). Results also show that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, say about 1%, results in an increase of indirect water productivity in the manufacturing blocks (0.49% and 0.38%), energy and water (0.39%) and service blocks (0.41%), providing evidence of the existence of a Verdoorn's Law for water.

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“…wet areas) conservation (Playán and Mateos, 2006;Frutos et al, 2008;Lecina et al, 2010), to increase agricultural production, and to improve the livelihood of the rural population (Plusquellec, 2009). This has resulted in a reduction of 12% of water consumption in the irrigated areas of Spain since mid-1990s (López-Gunn et al, 2012), and the traditional policy of creating new irrigated areas has been substituted to irrigation modernization, introducing more profitable crops and limiting nonpoint pollution (Albiac et al, 2007;Barros et al, 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modernization of new irrigated lands in a scenario of increasing water scarcity: from large reservoirs to small ponds

Jlassi

Nadal‐Romero

García-Ruiz

2016

CIG

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Lost in translation? Water efficiency in Spanish agriculture

Cited by 111 publications

References 11 publications

Integrated assessment of policy interventions for promoting sustainable irrigation in semi-arid environments: A hydro-economic modeling approach

Integrated assessment of policy interventions for promoting sustainable irrigation in semi-arid environments: A hydro-economic modeling approach

An Input-Output Assessment of Water Productivity in the Castile and León Region (Spain)

Modernization of new irrigated lands in a scenario of increasing water scarcity: from large reservoirs to small ponds

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