Enhancing climate resilience of irrigated agriculture: A review
Section snippets
Background
Released in August 2021, the most recent (IPCC) Report (IPCC, 2021) affirmed themportance of taking immediate global action to halt climate change and deal with its effects that have proven difficult to control. The report concluded that without immediate large scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and policies that could support it, such as climate clubs (Nordhaus, 2015, 2017), it will be impossible to limit warming close to a desired 1.5 °C or even 2 °C. This report elevates the
Methods of analysis
The approach used to answer the question posed above about principles and practices is the conduct of an extensive review of the literature containing just over 350 peer-reviewed citations. In the course of this review, the paper presents fourteen measures available for use to enhance the resilience of irrigated agriculture to adapt to climate change. As part of this review, the paper updates earlier works from 2013 to 2015 conducted for climate adaptation by irrigated agriculture in Israel (
Classical risk management measures
The selection by farmers of risk management strategies (Ducrot and Capillon, 2004; Galkin et al., 2018; Haro-Monteagudo et al., 2019; Ritchie et al., 2004) such as crop insurance affects the farm's production costs, revenues, and its allocation of on-farm resources including water. Risk management portfolios carrying higher levels of complexity often carry larger negative impacts on productivity impacts due to higher costs and elevated levels resources diverted from on-farm production
Economic investigations
The kinds of climate resilience adaptation policies for agriculture described above offers the potential to improve producer capacity for handling reductions in precipitation or streamflow or increases in their variability. One way to find the economically best mix of those policy measures for adapting to climate stress in irrigated agriculture is through development, use, and validation of an economic model of choices, or better yet, describing the path for economically optimized choices (
Conclusion
There is considerable and growing international interest by policymakers in finding ways to enhance the climate resilience of agricultural producers to better deal with forecast reduced water supplies and increased variability of those supplies. Enhanced climate resilience consists of actions taken by farmers and policymakers to reduce possible future losses by planning and preparing for potential climate hazards. These hazards can come from large changes in rainfall, snowpack, sea levels,
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for support by the New Mexico State University Agricultural Experiment Station.
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