Groundwater-dependent irrigation costs and benefits for adaptation to global change
Golam Saleh Ahmed Salem (),
So Kazama,
Shamsuddin Shahid and
Nepal C. Dey
Additional contact information
Golam Saleh Ahmed Salem: Tohoku University
So Kazama: Tohoku University
Shamsuddin Shahid: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Nepal C. Dey: Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee
Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 2018, vol. 23, issue 6, No 8, 953-979
Abstract:
Abstract The effects of a 1.5 °C global change on irrigation costs and carbon emissions in a groundwater-dependent irrigation system were assessed in the northwestern region of Bangladesh and examined at the global scale to determine possible global impacts and propose necessary adaptation measures. Downscaled climate projections were obtained from an ensemble of eight general circulation models (GCMs) for three representative concentration pathways (RCPs), RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5 and were used to generate the 1.5 °C warming scenarios. A water balance model was used to estimate irrigation demand, a support vector machine (SVM) model was used to simulate groundwater levels, an energy-use model was used to estimate carbon emissions from the irrigation pump, and a multiple linear regression (MLR) model was used to simulate the irrigation costs. The results showed that groundwater levels would likely drop by only 0.03 to 0.4 m under a 1.5 °C temperature increase, which would result in an increase in irrigation costs and carbon emissions ranging from 11.14 to 148.4 Bangladesh taka (BDT) and 0.3 to 4% CO2 emissions/ha, respectively, in northwestern Bangladesh. The results indicate that the impacts of climate change on irrigation costs for groundwater-dependent irrigation would be negligible if warming is limited to 1.5 °C; however, increased emissions, up to 4%, from irrigation pumps can have a significant impact on the total emissions from agriculture. This study revealed that similar impacts from irrigation pumps worldwide would result in an increase in carbon emissions by 4.65 to 65.06 thousand tons, based only on emissions from groundwater-dependent rice fields. Restricting groundwater-based irrigation in regions where the groundwater is already vulnerable, improving irrigation efficiency by educating farmers and enhancing pump efficiency by following optimum pumping guidelines can mitigate the impacts of climate change on groundwater resources, increase farmers’ profits, and reduce carbon emissions in regions with groundwater-dependent irrigation.
Keywords: 1.5 °C temperature increase; Carbon emissions; Groundwater levels; Irrigation costs; Northwestern Bangladesh (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11027-017-9767-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:masfgc:v:23:y:2018:i:6:d:10.1007_s11027-017-9767-7
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11027
DOI: 10.1007/s11027-017-9767-7
Access Statistics for this article
Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change is currently edited by Robert Dixon
More articles in Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().