Sustainable Groundwater Irrigation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide a strategic overview of a decade of experience in supporting various 'public administrations' around the world in their efforts to manage intensive (and in many cases excessive) groundwater resource exploitation for agricultural irrigation. Special emphasis is put on a number of aquifers, mainly in South & East Asia and Latin America, where GW•MATE has either been involved with the implementation of comprehensive 'pilot' projects over 3-5 years (in Argentina, Brazil, China and Morocco) or been invited to evaluate, advise and guide ongoing initiatives (in India, Mexico and Peru). These experiences are profiled through a series of boxes introduced in the overview-each exhibiting a varying degree of success but all providing hope and orientation for the future in this important aspect of water resource management. GW•MATE recommends use of a 'pragmatic framework' to identify of a balanced package of technical, economic, institutional and social measures appropriate to the hydrogeological setting and socioeconomic situation of the aquifer system (or groundwater body) under consideration, that can be introduced with the agreement of stakeholders to promote more sustainable groundwater use in agriculture.

Spring : managing groundwater sustainably

“…However, there were also clear limitations on the data used in these studies (mainly related to constraints on data availability and uncertainty, as well as distinctions between consumptive and non-consumptive use). 72 Stakeholders were therefore advised to consider these limitations in their dialogue and before the results were used in final decision making.…”

“…89 In many cases, these go some way to reducing the difference in price between use for irrigation of groundwater and canal-water (which itself has a long history of being highly subsidised). Although rural energy subsidies can often be politically justified, it has to be recognised that the adoption of flat-rate rural electricity tariffs (relating only to pump horse-power alone) is highly perverse, 90 since it results in farmers becoming insulated from one of the principal cost items associated with a falling water-table. It can also lead to extremely inefficient pumping practices in shallow aquifers with farmers continuing to operate waterwells at groundwater levels which are far too low and at which entry and pump friction losses are very high.…”

“…While this may be the case, it is very important to realise that in this form markets do not serve to restrict the total amount of groundwater abstraction or consumptive use, and indeed unconstrained they may have the opposite effect. 93 However, if they are deployed within a well-established framework of groundwater resource administration in which an enforceable cap on total consumptive use is in place (in effect as a market for a fixed volume of groundwater abstraction rights) they can become useful as a resource management tool, but even then it will often be necessary to constrain trading within specific zones of an aquifer for specific uses.…”

Assessing the apparent viscosity of decane-water emulsion in underground porous media based on the lattice Boltzmann method

“…As a crucial component in the hydrosphere, groundwater plays an important role in water balance, widely affecting many water systems such as urban domestic water (Kuroda, K., and Fukushi, 2008), industrial water (Foster, and Chilton, 2003), agricultural irrigation water (Garduño, and Foster, S., 2010). However, groundwater pollution caused by contaminants migration (Postigo, et al, 2018), percolation of liquid sprayed over land (Beckett, 1993), or inter-aquifer leakage (Nyer, 1992), has become a serious threat to the safety of groundwater systems.…”