Enhancing climate resilience of irrigated agriculture: A review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.114032Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Successful climate adaptation is needed to sustain irrigated agriculture.

  • This work reviews several risk reduction measures for irrigated agriculture.

  • A role for optimizing a portfolio of climate resilience adaptations is described.

  • Potential contributions by the use of hydroeconomic models is also described.

1. Abstract

Emerging evidence showing trends in climate change with a strong likelihood those changes will continue elevates the importance of finding affordable adaptations by irrigated agriculture. Successful climate adaptation measures are needed to affordably sustain irrigated agriculture in the face of elevated carbon emissions affecting the reliability of water supplies. Numerous potential adaptation options are available for adjusting irrigated agricultural systems to implement climate risk adaptation. This work focuses on addressing the gap in the literature defined by a scarcity of reviews on measures to elevate the capacity of irrigated agriculture to enhance its climate change resilience. Accordingly, the original contribution of this work is to review the literature describing measures for enhancing climate resilience by irrigated agriculture. In addition, it describes the role of economic analysis to discover affordable measures to enhance resilience by irrigated agriculture. It achieves those aims by posing the question “What principles, practices, and recent developments are available to guide discovery of measures to improve resilience by irrigated agriculture to adapt to ongoing evidence of climate change?” It addresses that question by reviewing several risk reduction measures to control the economic cost of losses to irrigators in the face of growing water supply unreliability. Following this review, a role for optimizing a portfolio of climate adaptation measures is described, followed by a discussion of potential contributions that can be made by the use of hydroeconomic analysis. Results provide a framework for economic analysis to discover economically attractive methods to elevate resilience of irrigated agriculture.

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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