Basin Water Management

Goal

Understanding the trade-offs and options in agricultural water management at the basin scale and contributing to improved equity and productivity in water use by developing appropriate tools and methods for analysis and management.

Overview

This theme is the cornerstone of IWMI’s research agenda, providing the context for identifying problems—sectorally, spatially, and temporally—and assessing the impact of proposed solutions. It examines the links between water and land productivity and identifies opportunities for improved productivity across the entire blue-green, rainfed-irrigated, surface water-groundwater spectrum. The rapid growth of urban centers and industry has led to increasing competition for water across sectors and the environment. Water management for agriculture can no longer be simply equated to the development and operation of water systems and structures, largely for irrigation. Moreover, water resources managers commonly work within a context where information is lacking, and the quality of data, when available, is poor. This has severely limited the development of sound and sustainable water management strategies. It is this gap, and pressure to develop agriculture, that has led to the water resources of many basins being over-exploited.

From the mid 1990s, IWMI began to place irrigation management within the overall context of river basins and to examine the interlinking hydrologic, socio-economic and environmental aspects of water management at multiple scales.

		Sustainable water use in agriculture
		To develop, test and apply analytical frameworks, water accounting methods and supporting tools to quantify and manage water resources for agriculture at a basin scale and to help managers apply them in selected basins.
		Understanding water productivity at basin scale
		To understand the impacts of field, farm and system level improvements in land and water productivity at the basin scale and to provide methods and tools for planners to develop policies and supporting strategies to increase net basin level water productivity.
		Institutions and policies for better water management at the basin scale
		To analyze, contextualize, evaluate and recommend institutional arrangements to manage water resources for agriculture at basin scale, over a range of contrasting conditions—with special emphasis on the balance between sustainable and productive use of water.