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

Jing Liu, Thomas Hertel, Richard Lammers, Alexander Prusevich, Uris Lantz Baldos, Danielle Grogan and Steve Frolking

No 332848, Conference papers from Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project

Abstract: Human activity induced 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-on-a-Grid, 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 under a variety of future (2050) scenarios that interact future 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 price and cropland expansion. This results in over 800 million more undernourished people and 0.87GtC 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.

Keywords: Food Security and Poverty; Resource/Energy Economics and Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Achieving Sustainable Irrigation Water Withdrawals: Global Impacts on Food Security and Land Use (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:pugtwp:332848

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