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Achieving sustainable irrigation water withdrawals: global impacts on food security and land use

Journal Article · · Environmental Research Letters
 [1];  [2];  [2];  [2];  [3];  [2];  [2]
  1. Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN (United States); Purdue University
  2. Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham, NH (United States)
  3. Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN (United States)
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Unsustainable water use challenges the capacity of water resources to ensure food security and continued growth of the economy. Adaptation policies targeting future water security can easily overlook its interaction with other sustainability metrics and unanticipated local responses to the larger-scale policy interventions. Using a global partial equilibrium grid-resolving model SIMPLE-G, and coupling it with the global Water Balance Model, we simulate the consequences of reducing unsustainable irrigation for food security, land use change, and terrestrial carbon. A variety of future (2050) scenarios are considered that interact irrigation productivity with two policy interventions— inter-basin water transfers and international commodity market integration. We find that pursuing sustainable irrigation may erode other development and environmental goals due to higher food prices and cropland expansion. This results in over 800,000 more undernourished people and 0.87 GtC additional emissions. Faster total factor productivity growth in irrigated sectors will encourage more aggressive irrigation water use in the basins where irrigation vulnerability is expected to be reduced by inter-basin water transfer. By allowing for a systematic comparison of these alternative adaptations to future irrigation vulnerability, the global gridded modeling approach offers unique insights into the multiscale nature of the water scarcity challenge.
Research Organization:
Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN (United States); Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham, NH (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0016162
OSTI ID:
1781802
Journal Information:
Environmental Research Letters, Journal Name: Environmental Research Letters Journal Issue: 10 Vol. 12; ISSN 1748-9326
Publisher:
IOP PublishingCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Cited By (2)

Agrivoltaics provide mutual benefits across the food–energy–water nexus in drylands journal September 2019
Temporal-Spatial Variations and Influencing Factor of Land Use Change in Xinjiang, Central Asia, from 1995 to 2015 journal January 2019

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Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
irrigation vulnerability
multi-scale hydro-economic modeling
sustainable development