Technical and Agronomical Assessment of the Use of Desalinated Seawater for Coastal Irrigation in an Insular Context

Abstract

The growing need for alternative water resources for irrigation has led to advanced technological developments, which are addressing some of the challenges that our planet is facing regarding the water supply. The Canary Islands Archipelago (Spain) is a singular territory with several years of desalination experience while using desalinated seawater (DSW) for agricultural purposes. The current paper will address the conducted research of one of the case studies done into the Horizon 2020 project MAGIC, with the aim of analyzing the use of DSW for crop production in the Southeast of Gran Canaria Island. A methodology of surveying farmers in the area has been put in practice, as well as an assessment of potential soil degradation risks that are related to DSW irrigation (with fifteen years of DSW data). Additionally, local good practices to improve the DSW quality for irrigation are discussed. This study demonstrates an excellent endorsement of the surveyed farmers in the studied area regarding the use of DSW for irrigation: the strategy of combining this type of water with other water resources, such as groundwater and/or reclaimed water is very frequent and it can guarantee water and food security in the island’s territory.

Co-creating narratives for WEF nexus governance: a Quantitative Story-Telling case study in the Canary Islands

“…A well-known sustainability problem related to the nexus is the cross-scale feedback between water scarcity, driven by decades of overdrafting freshwater resources in many Southern regions, and food security granted by those resources in Northern importing countries (Hogeboom et al 2020). The growing gap between water availability and demand has prompted the exploitation of non-conventional water resources, namely desalination and wastewater reuse (Gude 2017;Monterrey-Viña et al 2020). However, the viability of these alternative water resources (AWR) to address irrigation problems has repeatedly been called into question (Von Medeazza 2005).…”

Multidisciplinary assessment of the agricultural supply of desalinated seawater in south-eastern Spain

“…Large-scale supply with DSW has emerged as a promising water source in the last 15 years for sustaining irrigated agriculture in some water-scarce Mediterranean regions growing high-return crops, such as south-eastern (SE) Spain [8] and Israel [9], as well as on islands lacking freshwater resources [10]. Its adoption is increasingly being considered as an alternative agricultural water supply in places such as Morocco [11], Tunisia [12], Saudi Arabia [13], Mexico [14], South Korea [15], Chile [16] or California [17].…”

A Novel Magnetic Nano-Sorbent Functionalized from N-methyl-d-glucamine for Boron Removal from Desalinated Seawater

“…Water resources account for about three-quarters of the earth's surface, but there is a serious shortage of drinking water in many countries around the world [1,2], mainly in developing countries and countries in the Middle East [3]. The reason for this situation is that seawater and bitter brine account for 97.5% of the total water resources on the Earth, while freshwater accounts for only 2.5% of the total water resources on the Earth, of which 80% are distributed in the form of ice in the Arctic and in Antarctica, and on mountains [4,5].…”