The success of development programs depends on the role of underlying institutions and the impact synergies from closely related programs. Existing literature has limitations in accounting for these critical factors. This paper fills this gap by developing a methodology, which can quantify both the institutional roles in impact generation and the impact synergies from related programs. The methodology is applied to the Kala Oya Basin in Sri Lanka for evaluating the impacts of three development programs and 11 institutions on food security. The results provide valuable insights on the relative roles of institutions and the varying flow of impact synergies both within and across impact pathways.

With a rapidly expanding economy many changes are taking place in India today. The business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, which assumes the continuation of current trends of key water demand drivers, will meet the future food demand. However, it leads to a severe regional water crisis by 2050, where many river basins will reach closure, will be physically water-scarce and will have regions with severely overexploited groundwater resources. While the alternative scenarios of water demand show both optimistic and pessimistic water futures, the scenario with additional productivity growth is the most optimistic, with significant scope for reducing future water demand.

Trees are increasingly grown on-farm to supply wood and biomass needs within developing countries. Over the last several decades, within the irrigated rice-wheat growing lands of northern India, fast-growing poplar trees have been planted on tens of thousands of small farms. Recent debate regarding afforestation has raised the issue that water use is often increased when trees are planted. This ongoing debate focuses primarily on afforestation or reforestation of upland and rain-fed agricultural areas, and off-site impacts such as reduced streamflow. Adoption of poplar agroforestry in northern India, in contrast, is occurring in areas where land and water are already intensively used and managed for agricultural production. This study based on farmer survey data, used remote sensing and spatial hydrological modeling to investigate the importance and role of the poplar trees within the agricultural landscape, and to estimate their water use. Overall, results illustrate a potential for addressing the increasing global demand for wood products with trees grown on-farm within irrigated agroforestry systems.

Progressive agricultural and water development in the Krishna Basin in South India has led to a rising overcommitment of water resources and signs of basin closure are apparent during dry periods. As human consumptive uses are approaching the limits of water availability, this report focuses on the Lower Krishna Basin that bears the brunt of any intervention upstream. Capturing the process of basin closure requires an understanding of the political dimension of access to water and the scope for change. As basin closure intensifies the interconnectedness of ecosystems and water users, adjustments and management decisions result in spatial re-appropriation of water and basin-wide strategies for water management and development that start with the definition and the implementation of water allocation mechanisms are increasingly needed.

This study attempts to examine those unique aspects of interbasin water transfer planning, which are of critical importance to the sustainable water resources development in India. It focuses on the crucial aspect of accurate quantification of surface water availability, which determines the entire feasibility of a water transfer. It also illustrates the impacts of upstream water resources development on the deltas' environment thus justifying the deltas' environmental flow requirements. The report targets government departments, research institutions and NGOs - primarily in India and other countries of the region - which are engaged or interested in issues of interbasin water transfer and environmental water management. The research intends to: contribute to the effectiveness of water resources planning and management in India; emphasize the need for urgent improvement of access to hydrometeorological data in the country; and aim to stimulate further debate on water transfers.

Increasing income and urbanization are triggering a rapid change in food consumption patterns in India. This report assesses India's changing food consumption patterns and their implications on future food and water demand. According to the projections made in this study, the total calorie supply would continue to increase, but the dominance of food grains in the consumption basket is likely to decrease by 2050, and the consumption of non-grain crops and animal products would increase to provide a major part of the daily calorie supply. Although the total food grain demand will decrease, the total grain demand is likely to increase with the increasing feed demand for the livestock. The implications of the changing consumption patterns are assessed through consumptive water use (CWU) under the assumptions of full or partial food self-sufficiency.

Water resource development has played a significant role in the expansion of agriculture and industry in the Olifants River Catchment. However, currently water deficit is one of the major constraints hampering development in the catchment; both the mining and agricultural sectors are producing below optimal levels because of their reliance on insufficient supplies. In this study, the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) model was used to evaluate scenarios of historic, current and future water demand in the catchment. For each scenario, the WEAP model was used to simulate demand in five different sectors (rural, urban, mining, commercial forestry and irrigation) over a 70-year period of varying rainfall and hydrology. Levels of assured supply were estimated for each sector and the economic cost of failing to provide water was predicted. For the future scenarios, the impact of infrastructure development and water conservation measures were assessed. The study illustrates how a relatively simple model can provide useful insight for resource planning and management.

Treadle pump (TP) technology has been promoted by Enterprise Works Worldwide (EWW) as an alternative to the traditional rope and bucket irrigation that is necessary to overcome the challenge of uncertain and inadequate rainfall for agricultural production. The aim is to improve output, increase incomes and reduce poverty among farm households. This study examines the strategies used for dissemination of the TP and the dynamics of its adoption and impacts, with a special focus on poverty reduction. The results of the study reveal that time and labor savings for irrigation, increased size of irrigated areas and lack of fuel requirements are the attractive features of the TP for those who adopt it. Adoption of TP increases land and labor productivities; and also net farm incomes. The study also demonstrates that adoption of the TP reduces poverty.

In the face of growing water stress and increasing concerns over the sustainability of water use, Tanzania has, in common with many other countries in Africa, focused largely on the development of more integrated catchment-wide approaches to water management. In the Great Ruaha River Basin, considerable effort has gone into increasing water productivity and the promotion of mechanisms for more efficient allocation of water resources. Over a period of five years, the RIPARWIN project investigated water management in the basin and evaluated the effectiveness of some of the mechanisms that have been introduced. The study findings are relevant to basins in developing countries where there is competition for water and irrigation is one of the main uses.

Impacts of increasing population pressure on food demand and land and water resources have sparked interest in nutrient and water balances and flows at a range of scales. In IWMI Research Report 115, it was tried for the first time to quantify rural-urban food flows for selected cities in Ghana and Burkina Faso to analyse their dependency on food supplied from rural vs. peri-urban vs. urban farming. Both, the urban nutrient and water footprints are closely interlinked. Currently, 80-95 percent of the domestic water used and the nutrients consumed go to waste without treatment or resource recovery. The economic dimensions are significant. Options to reduce the environmental burden by closing the rural-urban water and nutrient cycles are discussed.

This report attempts to introduce a prototype scoring system for the ecological status of rivers in India and illustrate it through the applications in several major river basins. This system forms part of the desktop environmental flow assessment and is based on a number of indicators reflecting ecological condition and sensitivity of a river. The unique aspect of this study is that it interprets, for the first time, the existing ecological information for Indian rivers in the context of environmental flow assessment. The report targets government departments, research institutions and NGOs which are engaged in environmental flow management and associated policy development, and suggests some subsequent steps in environmental flow work in India.

Growing concerns about the allocation of increasingly scarce water resources warrant tools to quantify its distribution. The present study explores the application of the Gini Coefficient to this end. The tool is tested in the water-stressed Olifants Water Management Area, in South Africa. The Gini Coefficient for the distribution of entitlements to water is shown to be 0.96. The value was less when calculating the distribution of benefits from employment in water-dependent enterprises. Using this tool for policy scenarios, more than doubling the use of water by rural households would require the registered large-scale users to reduce their current entitlements by 6 percent. These and other applications highlight the potential usefulness of the Gini Coefficient to inform policymaking and monitoring of better sharing of water and its benefits in South Africa and elsewhere.

This report identifies the driving forces for reforestation in three villages of Northern Vietnam. Using an institutional analysis focused on the rules governing upland access and use, the authors assess the relative impact of state policies (reforestation programs and forestland allocation) on land use change. Findings show that the latter are indirectly responsible for reforestation, but not because of the incentives they provided. Instead, they disrupted the local rules governing annual crop cultivation and grazing activities leading to the end of annual cropping. Tree plantation was chosen by farmers as a last resort option. Lessons learned highlight the importance of local level studies and collective rules for land management.

Discharge from the Krishna River into the ocean decreased by 75 percent from 1960-2005, and was zero during a recent multi-year drought. This paper describes the physical geography and hydrology of the Krishna Basin, including runoff production and a basic water account based on hydronomic zones. More than 50 percent of the basin's irrigated area is groundwater irrigation, which is not currently included in inter-state allocation rules. Future water allocation will require inclusion of the interactions among all irrigated areas, including those irrigated by groundwater and surface water.

The authors reflect on the theory and process of creating effective strategies for adaptive river basin management. We formulate our framework from observations of responses to environmental and hydrological change in the Great Ruaha River in Tanzania. We find that problems occur in the pursuit of 'integrated water resources management' (IWRM) that can be attended to by applying a focused expedient approach in three states of the water availability regime: 'critical water', 'medial water' and 'bulk water'. In particular, less reliance on broad generic 'principles' and greater reference to solutions being drawn up by local resource users in relation to identified conflicts helps guide adaptive problem solving.

High irrigation investment costs together with declining world prices for food and the failures of a number of high profile past irrigation projects are the main reasons for the reluctance of development agencies and governments in sub-Saharan Africa to invest more resources in irrigation. This study aims to systematically establish whether costs of irrigation projects in sub-Saharan Africa are truly high, determine the factors which influence costs and performance of irrigation projects, and recommend cost-reducing and performance-enhancing options to make irrigation investments in the region more attractive. It analyzes 314 irrigation projects implemented from 1967 to 2003 in 50 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America funded by the World Bank, African Development Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

This study uses both farmer surveys and physical measurements to understand the impact RCTs have had on water use and water savings in the irrigated Rice-Wheat Zone of Pakistan's Punjab province. The findings show that field scale water savings achieved from RCTs is not necessarily equivalent to water savings at broader scales and may even result in an increase in overall water depletion.

The primary purpose of this report is to stimulate the debate about environmental water allocations in India, where this concept is only beginning to receive attention and recognition. It is a component of a larger research project which aims to assess multiple aspects of India's National River Linking Project and water future in general.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize IIMI/IWMI's past research and interventions related to irrigation management transfer and to document, to the extent possible, the academic, policy, and technical outcomes of these efforts. The application of a range of direct and indirect measurement techniques suggests an overall positive contribution from IWMI to IMT theory and application.

This document summarizes the materials and methods used to create a series of maps of irrigated areas of the world using remote sensing approaches. These maps are complementary to existing statistics (FAO-Aquastat) and the GISderived maps (FAO/University of Frankfurt Global irrigated area map). The document also provides details of how the estimates of global irrigated areas in one main season (net) and more than one season (intensity or annualized) were derived.

This report presents the findings of a study to assess changes to flows into, and downstream of, the Usangu Wetlands, located in the headwaters of the Great Ruaha River, Tanzania. Hydrological data, in conjunction with remote sensing techniques, were used to provide insights into changes that have occurred to the Eastern Wetland. Results indicate that, between 1958 and 2004, inflows to the wetland declined by about 70 percent in the dry season months (July to November) as a consequence of increased human withdrawals, primarily for irrigation.

The purpose of this study was to identify risk areas in Thailand where insecticide resistance in malaria mosquitoes might develop as a consequence of crop protection activities in agriculture. The study provides guidelines on how to delineate risk areas. A review of insecticide resistance in disease vectors and the potential role of agricultural insecticides is presented.

This report tries to provide a state-of-the-art overview on irrigated urban agriculture in the W est African subregion based on a com prehensive literature review supported by the results of three IWMI FAO projects.

This report highlights the potentially significant impacts on the hydrologic cycle and the importance of considering secondary effects, particularly with regard to water, resulting from the widespread adoption of global climate change mitigation measures. It is recommended that the implicit hydrologic dimensions of climate change mitigation should be more formally articulated within the international environmental conventions, and recognized within future UNFCCC negotiations on the CDM-AR provisions.