Establishing and testing a catchment water footprint framework to inform sustainable irrigation water use for an aquifer under stress

The Science of the Total Environment
Betsie le RouxJohn G Annandale

Abstract

Future water scarcities in the face of an increasing population, climate change and the unsustainable use of aquifers will present major challenges to global food production. The ability of water footprints (WFs) to inform water resource management at catchment-scale was investigated on the Steenkoppies Aquifer, South Africa. Yields based on cropping areas were multiplied with season-specific WFs for each crop to determine blue and green water consumption by agriculture. Precipitation and evapotranspiration of natural vegetation and other uses of blue water were included with the agricultural WFs to compare water availability and consumption in a catchment sustainability assessment. This information was used to derive a water balance and develop a catchment WF framework that gave important insights into the hydrology of the aquifer through a simplified method. This method, which requires the monitoring of only a few key variables, including rainfall, agricultural production, WFs of natural vegetation and other blue water flows, can be applied to inform the sustainability of catchment scale water use (as opposed to more complex hydrological studies). Results indicate that current irrigation on the Steenkoppies Aquifer is unsusta...Continue Reading

Citations

Apr 19, 2020·The Science of the Total Environment·Xinchun CaoXiangping Guo
Mar 2, 2021·Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture·Amit BiswasNarendra S Raghuwanshi

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