A Method for comprehensively Assessing Economic Trade-Offs of New Irrigation Developments

C. Petheram (), J. Hughes, L. McKellar, S. Kim, L. Holz, P. Poulton, M. Kehoe, S. Podger, G. Podger, D. McJannet and J. Hornbuckle
Additional contact information
C. Petheram: CSIRO Land and Water Flagship
J. Hughes: CSIRO Land and Water Flagship
L. McKellar: CSIRO Land and Water Flagship
S. Kim: CSIRO Land and Water Flagship
L. Holz: CSIRO Land and Water Flagship
P. Poulton: CSIRO Agriculture Flagship
M. Kehoe: CSIRO Land and Water Flagship
S. Podger: CSIRO Land and Water Flagship
G. Podger: CSIRO Land and Water Flagship
D. McJannet: CSIRO Land and Water Flagship
J. Hornbuckle: CSIRO Land and Water Flagship

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2016, vol. 30, issue 13, No 10, 4617-4634

Abstract: Abstract To meet the anticipated increase in global demand for food and fibre products, large areas of land around the world are being cleared and infrastructure constructed to enable irrigation, referred to herein as ‘greenfield irrigation’. One of the challenges in assessing the profitability of a greenfield irrigation development is understanding the impact of variability in climate and water availability and the trade-offs with scheme size, cost and the sensitivity of crop yield to water stress. For example, is it more profitable to irrigate a small area of land most years or a large area once every few years? And, is it more profitable to partially or fully water the crop? This paper presents a new method for efficiently linking a river system model and an agricultural production model to explore the financial trade-offs of different management choices, thereby enabling the optimal scheme area and most appropriate level of farmer risk to be identified. The method is demonstrated for a hypothetical but plausible greenfield irrigation development based around a large dam in the Flinders catchment, northern Australia. It was found that a dam and irrigation development paid for and operated by the same entity is not, under the conditions examined in this analysis, economically sustainable. The method could also be used to explore the impact of different management strategies on the agricultural production and profitability of existing irrigation schemes within a whole of river system context.

Keywords: Economics; Hydrology; Agriculture; Northern Australia; Greenfield; Management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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/s11269-016-1443-2 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:waterr:v:30:y:2016:i:13:d:10.1007_s11269-016-1443-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-016-1443-2

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().