Dynamics of Water Accounting Balance for Assessing Water Stress Vulnerability Considering Social Aspects

To advance proper planning, water accounting (WA) could provide the possibility of linking physical and operational data to their interdisciplinary attributes. In its new form, WA, combined with a dynamic model considering socio-economic aspects, is a valuable tool for rectifying today's water issues. The social water-accounting-based system dynamics (SWA-SD) provides a feedback-based platform to better support flexible decision-making. Analyzing the indicators that correspond to water security in the context of DPSIR (driving force-pressure-state-impact-response) and SWA-SD combined with principal component analysis (PCA) for identifying data patterns is applied to a generic study area suffering from water stress to assess the environmental, economic, and social vulnerabilities. The water accounting has to be based on water balance data (called water accounting balance). As a practical solution to generate water balance data, a time series by the use of basic climatic and hydrologic data is synthesized. According to the results, the water stress and urbanization index were increased by a factor of 43% and 64% in 2020 during a 20-year time horizon, respectively, which is alarming for the region. Moreover, the economic and social water resources vulnerability shows an upward trend, and the environmental component shows many highs (as much as 2.24) and lows (as low as 0.73) due to different supply measures responded to the increasing demands. This study provides a basis that can be replicated for other developing regions to quantify this type of important planning information and for implementing different socially sensitive triggers and technically feasible to measure water vulnerabilities.

The politics of evaporation and the making of atmospheric territory in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

Scholarship on the hydrosocial cycle has tended to overlook the atmospheric phase of the cycle. This paper identifies and conceptualises a politics of evaporation in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin. Evaporation is not a neutral hydrological concept to be understood, measured or acted on without an appreciation of the networks in which it originates, the geo-political circumstances that continue to shape its circulation, and its socio-spatial effects. The politics of evaporation is conceptualised here as a process of hydrosocial territorialisation in which atmospheric water came to be known as a force acting within a balanced hydrologic cycle, and ‘atmospheric territory’ was created. The scientific origins of evaporation show (i) how modernist hydrologic technologies and conventions that relied on containment and territorialisation to account for and control water led to the negative depiction of evaporation as a loss, and (ii) the historical depth of processes of abstraction and commensuration that are so influential in today’s regimes of water accounting and marketisation. The politics of evaporation is identified empirically in the controversy surrounding the management of the Menindee Lakes and the lower Darling River in New South Wales, where efforts to ‘save’ water according to the logic of efficiency have enrolled atmospheric water into a Basin-wide program to redistribute surface water. The lens of evaporation theorises a neglected aspect of the materiality of water that is particularly important to the dry, hot parts of the world. It challenges us to rethink the ‘cycle’ as well as the ‘hydro’, while providing further evidence of the value of thinking about territory in a material register as volumetric and not areal.

Solar Pumps and Water-Energy Nexus in Gujarat, India: First Assessment of the World’s Largest Pilot on Grid-connected Solar Irrigation Pumps

The epicentre of Gujarat’s perverse nexus between electricity subsidy and groundwater depletion lies in its legacy of 485,000 unmetered tubewell owners who have fiercely resisted metering for 20 years. These comprise 40 percent of Gujarat’s irrigation connections but account for 49 percent of agricultural load, 71 percent of energy use in groundwater abstraction and 90 percent of farm power subsidies. Suryashakti Kisan Yojana (SKY), a large, state-wide pilot project which solarised and net-metered 4215 tubewells and began paying farmers for evacuating surplus solar energy, has been enthusiastically embraced by unmetered and metered farmers alike. SKY promises politically acceptable resolution of a wicked energy-water conundrum that afflicts much of India and west Asia. Mainstreaming SKY can significantly reduce groundwater overdraft, GHG emissions and subsidy burden. It will increase farm incomes while radically improving energy-water accounting and management. Gujarat government should invest in compulsory, free-of-cost solarisation of tubewells. We show that doing so is profitable for government and beneficial for farmers, climate and environment.

Water Accounting Plus (WA+) through Remote Sensing in the Yarmouk Tributary Basin

<p>Coping with the issue of water scarcity and growing competition for water among different sectors requires effective water management strategies and decision processes. ‘Getting it right’ becomes doubly important when dealing with intenational transboundary rivers. The Yarmouk tributary to the Jordan River is one highly exploited in the Middle East, and is enveloped by ambiguous treaties and decades of violent and non-violent conflict. Seeking to chart a more sustainable and equitable future, this work performs a 'water accounting plus' methodology employing readily available remotely sensed satellite-based data coupled with available measurements.  A variety of methods described herein were used to detect irrigated crops and produce maps showing the distribution throughout the basin. The framework also focuses on the classification of land use categories and the processes by which water is depleted over all land use classes that contributes to separate the beneficial from non-beneficial usage of water. The analysis was started prior to the 2011 start of the Syrian war in order to study the initial distribution of land use classes as well as the water depletion processes before any change in the basin. It shows that more than half of the exploitable water is not consumed within the basin and depleted outside. In contrast, most of the water consumed within the basin is wasted and depleted in a non-beneficial way. Roughly 35% of the cultivated area shown to be irrigated through withdrawals which exceed the capacity of the source. This result reflects the high abstraction rates from groundwater via a large number of unlicensed wells mostly located at the Syrian side. This study also detect a deficiency in the water balance of the Yarmouk River. The findings are relevant to sustainable management not only for water-dependent sectors but also for geopolitical stability among the riparian countries. In this way, open- access remote sensing derived data can provide useful information about the status of water resources especially when ground measurements are poor or absent.</p><p> </p><p>Keywords: Yarmouk, Water Accounting Plus, IWM, Irrigated crops, WAPOR.</p>

Embedding smart technologies in accounting to meet global irrigation challenges

Purpose Agriculture is under pressure to produce more food under increasingly variable climate conditions. Consequently, producers need management innovations that lead to improved physical and financial productivity. Currently, farm accounting technologies lack the sophistication to allow producers to analyse productivity of water. Furthermore water-related agricultural technology (“agtech”) systems do not readily link to accounting innovations. This study aims to establish a conceptual and practical framework for linking temporal, biophysical and management decision-making to accounting by develop a soil moisture and climate monitoring tool. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts an exploratory mixed-methods approach to understand supply of and demand for water accounting and water-related agtech; and bundling these innovations with farm accounting to generate a stable tool with the ability to improve agricultural practices over time. Three phases of data collection are the focus here: first, a desk-based review of water accounting and water technology – including benchmarking of key design characteristics of these methods and key actor interviews to verify and identify trends, allowing for conceptual model development; second, a producer survey to test demand for the “bundled” conceptual model; third and finally, a participant-based case study in potato-farming that links the data from direct monitoring and remote sensing to farm accounts. Findings Design characteristics of water accounting and agtech innovations are bundled into an overall irrigation decision-making conceptual model based on in-depth review of available innovations and verification by key actors. Producer surveys suggest enough demand to pursue practical bundling of these innovations undertaken by developing an integrated accounting, soil moisture and climate monitoring tool on-farm. Productivity trends over two seasons of case study data demonstrate the pivotal role of accounting in leading to better technical irrigation decisions and improving water productivity. Originality/value The model can assist practitioners to gauge strengths and weaknesses of contemporary water accounting fads and fashions and potential for innovation bundling for improved water productivity. The practical tool demonstrates how on-farm irrigation decision-making can be supported by linking farm accounting systems and smart technology

Quantitative identification of water consumption in electricity development in 2017 in China

This paper takes each province and region as the research object and 2017 as the research period, and the water consumption of power production was analyzed. The results showed that China’s electricity production consumed 6.57 billion m³ of water, accounting for 2% of the total social water consumption in 2017. Thermal power is the most water-consuming power source in China, accounting for 78% of the total water consumption in the country’s electric power development. Based on the calculated results, this study also puts forward relevant suggestions for realizing energy-water coordinated security.

Mapping groundwater abstractions from irrigated agriculture: big data, inverse modeling, and a satellite–model fusion approach

The agricultural sector in Saudi Arabia has witnessed rapid growth in both production and area under cultivation over the last few decades. This has prompted some concern over the state and future availability of fossil groundwater resources, which have been used to drive this expansion. Large-scale studies using satellite gravimetric data show a declining trend over this region. However, water management agencies require much more detailed information on both the spatial distribution of agricultural fields and their varying levels of water exploitation through time than coarse gravimetric data can provide. Relying on self-reporting from farm operators or sporadic data collection campaigns to obtain needed information are not feasible options, nor do they allow for retrospective assessments. In this work, a water accounting framework that combines satellite data, meteorological output from weather prediction models, and a modified land surface hydrology model was developed to provide information on both irrigated crop water use and groundwater abstraction rates. Results from the local scale, comprising several thousand individual center-pivot fields, were then used to quantify the regional-scale response. To do this, a semi-automated approach for the delineation of center-pivot fields using a multi-temporal statistical analysis of Landsat 8 data was developed. Next, actual crop evaporation rates were estimated using a two-source energy balance (TSEB) model driven by leaf area index, land surface temperature, and albedo, all of which were derived from Landsat 8. The Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE) model was then adapted to use satellite-based vegetation and related surface variables and forced with a 3 km reanalysis dataset from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Groundwater abstraction rates were then inferred by estimating the irrigation supplied to each individual center pivot, which was determined via an optimization approach that considered CABLE-based estimates of evaporation and TSEB-based satellite estimates. The framework was applied over two study regions in Saudi Arabia: a small-scale experimental facility of around 40 center pivots in Al Kharj that was used for an initial evaluation and a much larger agricultural region in Al Jawf province comprising more than 5000 individual fields across an area exceeding 2500 km2. Total groundwater abstraction for the year 2015 in Al Jawf was estimated at approximately 5.5 billion cubic meters, far exceeding any recharge to the groundwater system and further highlighting the need for a comprehensive water management strategy. Overall, this novel data–model fusion approach facilitates the compilation of national-scale groundwater abstractions while also detailing field-scale information that allows both farmers and water management agencies to make informed water accounting decisions across multiple spatial and temporal scales.