Z. Eslami; S, Janatrostami; A. Ashrafzadeh; Y. Pourmohamad
Abstract
Introduction: Implementing Integrated Water Resources Management requires balancing conflicting goals, and the effects on developing countries, which have a poor institutional capacity for change, and suggests a slower pace of integrated water resources management. The growing population of the world, ...
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Introduction: Implementing Integrated Water Resources Management requires balancing conflicting goals, and the effects on developing countries, which have a poor institutional capacity for change, and suggests a slower pace of integrated water resources management. The growing population of the world, especially in developing countries on one hand, and the need to provide food for this population, on the other hand, have not been the result of overreaching of resources. In this manner, the continuation of an untapped harvest of resources will endanger the sustainability of the region in the near future. Food production is largely depending on the water so that 70 to 80 percent of the water extracted from resources is consumed for irrigation, which is the reason why irrigated cultivation is regarded as inefficient consumers. Understanding how to extract, manage and consume water is the key to solve this problem. On the other hand, the health and safety of communities and agricultural production require energy. Principally in irrigation, it is not possible to extract water without consuming energy. Seeking to establish the goals of the third millennium of the United Nations, researchers have presented a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to achieve a dynamic balance in the food production and consumption of resources, most notably the approach of Water, Energy and Food (WEF) Nexus. Considering the limitation of the resources which is increasing day by day. This approach causes productivity increase by integrating water, energy and food cycles. Managing water, energy and food, despite the inherent systemic differences, are very similar, due to the close relationship between the system perspective and their interaction with each other, a new concept is now called a Nexus approach. This viewpoint describes the interconnected nature and the interplay of the three sectors.
Materials and Methods: This research was carried out in Sefid-Rud dam Irrigation and Drainage Network. Sefid-Rud basin is located in the Guilan province, which is benefits from high precipitation, but factors such as dams construction in the upper reaches of the Sefid-Rud dam, the timely inconvenient precipitation and the lack of infrastructure to harvest the runoff, causes water shortages in the area. It is worth mentioning that 50% of the Guilan households have engaged in rice cultivation and more than 70% of the lands are located in the irrigation and drainage network of the Sefid-Rud dam. Hence, reducing rice cultivation in this region will have a great impact on economic and social life. Managing a Nexus approach to provide WEF security requires integrated and analytical approaches that can identify cross-sectoral exchanges, cost-effective planning, policy, and strategy management. Therefore, in this study, WEAP and LEAP software were used for managing water and food resources and managing the energy sector in Sefid-Rud irrigation and drainage network, respectively. Then, the integrated water resources management in the area was addressed by establishing a linkage between these two applications. In the first part of this study, the parameters output such as net water demand, water resources share for each demand node, unmet demand and the coverage regardless of the energy sector were compared.
Results and Discussion: The results reveal that the annual water requirement of the Sefid-Rud irrigation and drainage network in 2016 with the NEXUS approach estimated about 8 million cubic meters more than the non-NEXUS approach. Agriculture is the most water-consuming node in the region and there are lots of dependencies on rice cultivation as the most water-consuming crop in the Guilan region. The next step aims to balance the supply and demand, the unmet demand at the agricultural section in the Foomanat, Central and East areas under various management scenarios. These scenarios are including dredging, increase the efficiency of transmission and distribution channels of irrigation and drainage networks, and eliminating unauthorized wells were evaluated.
Conclusion: By examining the results of the applied management scenarios mentioned above, the 30% increase in the efficiency of transmission and distribution channels of irrigation and drainage networks in Sefid-Rud has the greatest impact on meeting the demand and reducing the unmet demands of triple areas. As a result of the 30% efficiency improvement scenario, decrease the agricultural demands of the Foomanat area, the central area, and the east (about 29.1, 84.5 and 62.1 million cubic meters, respectively) more than the reference scenario.
Yavar Pourmohamad; Mohammad Mousavi baygi; Amin Alizadeh; Alinaghi Ziaei; Mohammad Bannayan
Abstract
Introductionin current situation when world is facing massive population, producing enough food and adequate income for people is a big challenge specifically for governors. This challenge gets even harder in recent decades, due to global population growth which was projected to increase to 7.8 billion ...
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Introductionin current situation when world is facing massive population, producing enough food and adequate income for people is a big challenge specifically for governors. This challenge gets even harder in recent decades, due to global population growth which was projected to increase to 7.8 billion in 2025. Agriculture as the only industry that has ability to produce food is consuming 90 percent of fresh water globally. Despite of increasing for food demand, appropriate agricultural land and fresh water resources are restricted. To solve this problem, one is to increase water productivity which can be obtain by irrigation. Iran is not only exempted from this situation but also has more critical situation due to its dry climate and inappropriate precipitation distribution spatially and temporally, also uneven distribution of population which is concentrate in small area. The only reasonable solution by considering water resources limitation and also restricted crop area is changing crop pattern to reach maximum or at least same amount of income by using same or less amount of water. The purpose of this study is to assess financial water productivity and optimize farmer’s income by changing in each crop acreage at basin and sub-basin level with no extra groundwater withdrawals, also in order to repair the damages which has enforce to groundwater resources during last decades a scenario of using only 80percent of renewable water were applied and crop area were optimize to provide maximum or same income for farmers.
Materials and methodsThe Neyshabour basin is located in northeast of Iran, the total geographical area of basin is 73,000 km2 consisting of 41,000 km2 plain and the rest of basin is mountains. This Basin is a part of Kalshoor catchment that is located in southern part of Binaloud heights and northeast of KavirMarkazi. In this study whole Neyshabour basin were divided into 199 sub-basins based on pervious study.Based on official reports, agriculture consumes around 93.5percent of the groundwater withdrawals in Neyshabour basin and mostly in irrigation fields, surface water resources share in total water resource withdrawals is about 4.2percent, which means that groundwater is a primary source of fresh water for different purposes and surface water has a minor role in providing water supply services in the Neyshabour basin. To determine crop cultivation area, major crops divided into two groups. two winter crops (Wheat and Barley) and two summer crops (Maize and Tomato). To accomplish land classification by using supervised method, a training area is needed, so different farms for each crop were chosen by consulting with official agricultural organization expert and multiple point read on GPS for each crop. The maximum likelihood (MLC) method was selected for the land cover classification. To estimate the amount of precipitation at each 199 sub-basins, 13 station data for precipitation were collected, these stations are including 11 pluviometry stations, one climatology station and one synoptic station. Actual evapotranspiration (ETa) is needed to estimate actual yield (Ya). Surface Energy Balance Algorithm for Land (SEBAL) technique were applied on Landsat 8 OLI images. To calculate actual ETa, the following steps in flowchart were modeled as tool in ArcGIS 10.3 and a spreadsheet file. To estimate actual crop yield, the suggested procedure by FAO-33 and FAO-66 were followed. Financial productivity could be defined in differently according to interest. In this study several of these definition was used. These definitions are Income productivity (IP) and Profit productivity (PP). To optimize crop area, linear programing technique were used.
Results and discussionaverage actual evapotranspiration result for each sub-basin are shown in context. In some sub-basins which there were no evapotranspiration are shown in white. And it happens in those sub-basins which assigned as desert in land classification. In figures 8 and 9 minimum amount of income and profit productivity for wheat and barley is negative, this number means in those area the value of precipitation is higher than value of evapotranspiration, so lower part of eq. 21 and 22 would be negative and in result water productivity would be negative. Since most of precipitation occurs during cold season of the year these numbers are expected. Two sub-basins of 43 and 82 has the value of negative, it means in these two sub-basins groundwater are recharging during the year 2014-2015.The maximum value of income and profit productivity belong to wheat and barley which are winter crops and mostly rain fed, so amount applied water would be so low and in result productivity increased. Among the summer crops maize has the most income and profit income which can be interpret due to their growing period and the crop types. Maize has around 110 days to reach to maturity and harvest, on the other hand tomato needs 145 days to harvest. Some plant is C3 and some are C4. C4 plants produce more biomass than C3 crops with same amount of water which leads to more productivity. The results showed that tomato should have the most changes in area reduction (0.2) and maize should have no changes in both scenarios. Crop area should reduce to 66percent of current cultivation area to maintain ground water level and only 6percent reduction in cultivation area would result in 20percent groundwater recharging.
Conclusion to save groundwater resources or even retrieve the only water resource, cultivation area must reduce if the crop pattern will not change. In this study only four crops were studied. It seems best solution is to introduce alternative crop.
