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| Titel |
Water demand and supply co-adaptation to mitigate climate change impacts in agricultural water management |
| VerfasserIn |
Matteo Giuliani, Matteo Mainardi, Andrea Castelletti, Claudio Gandolfi |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2013
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 15 (2013) |
| Datensatznummer |
250078297
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Agriculture is the main land use in the world and represents also the sector characterised by
the highest water demand. To meet projected growth in human population and per-capita food
demand, agricultural production will have to significantly increase in the next decades.
Moreover, water availability is nowadays a limiting factor for agricultural production, and is
expected to decrease over the next century due to climate change impacts. To effectively face
a changing climate, agricultural systems have therefore to adapt their strategies (e.g.,
changing crops, shifting sowing and harvesting dates, adopting high efficiency
irrigation techniques). Yet, farmer adaptation is only one part of the equation because
changes in water supply management strategies, as a response to climate change,
might impact on farmers’ decisions as well. Despite the strong connections between
water demand and supply, being the former dependent on agricultural practices,
which are affected by the water available that depends on the water supply strategies
designed according to a forecasted demand, an analysis of their reciprocal feedbacks is
still missing. Most of the recent studies has indeed considered the two problems
separately, either analysing the impact of climate change on farmers’ decisions
for a given water supply scenario or optimising water supply for different water
demand scenarios. In this work, we explicitly connect the two systems (demand and
supply) by activating an information loop between farmers and water managers, to
integrate the two problems and study the co-evolution and co-adaptation of water
demand and water supply systems under climate change. The proposed approach is
tested on a real-world case study, namely the Lake Como serving the Muzza-Bassa
Lodigiana irrigation district (Italy). In particular, given an expectation of water
availability, the farmers are able to solve a yearly planning problem to decide the most
profitable crop to plant. Knowing the farmers decisions, the operation of the upstream
reservoir (Como Lake) is optimised with respect to the real irrigation demand of
the crops. Then, the farmers can re-adapt their decisions according with the new
optimal operating strategy, thus activating a loop between the two systems that
exchange expected supply and irrigation demand. Results show that the proposed
interaction between farmers and water managers is able to enhance the efficiency of
water management practices, foster crop production and mitigate climate change
impacts. |
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