Diffusion of Smart Irrigation Systems for Tackling Water-Energy-Food Nexus Challenges in the Indus Basin

EasyChair Preprint no. 2574

Abstract

Irrigation is crucial for the well-being of an estimated 300 million people residing in the transboundary Indus River Basin (IRB) region of South Asia. At the same time, the IRB is severely water-stressed and irrigation is on average receiving 90-95% of total surface water allocations while depleting fossil groundwater reserves by more than 30 km³ per year. Implementation of modern irrigation technologies such as sprinkler, drip, and canal lining and smart irrigation technologies such as soil moisture sensors, canal water monitoring meters and laser leveling demonstrated the huge potential for solving the water scarcity, access inequality problems, enhance resource efficiency, reduce inequalities and provide a backbone for accurate basin-wide water accounting. Yet, there is a lack of multi-sectoral analysis linking smart irrigation, regional cooperation and competing long-term sustainability objectives. Here, we apply an integrated model of the IRB’s transboundary water, energy and agricultural sectors to assess how coordinated basin-wide water-energy management influences the multi-sector benefits of smart irrigation. Results indicate modern and smart irrigation technologies play an important role in improving upstream water availability by reducing the water application at the field level and how this interacts with energy and climate change targets aiming to reduce emissions together with improving energy access. The increased upstream water availability in the industrial and domestic sectors avoids expanded use of fossil groundwater and advanced water treatment, decrease the energy intensity in the agriculture sector, reduce the greenhouse gas emission, and can be utilized to produce more hydropower. The current study can play a vital role in understanding sustainable resources use investment costs, and the applied analytical methods can be adapted to other regions of the world with similar hydro-climatology.

Keyphrases: agricultural water management, Indus, Integrated Nexus Modeling, irrigation technology, Smart Irrigation Systems, water use efficiency

@Booklet{EasyChair:2574,
  author = {Ansir Ilyas and Simon Parkinson and Adriano Vinca and Abubakr Muhammad},
  title = {Diffusion of Smart Irrigation Systems for Tackling Water-Energy-Food Nexus Challenges in the Indus Basin},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 2574},

  year = {EasyChair, 2020}}