Valuation of Ecosystem Services for Improving Agricultural Water Management

The Activity hypothesis is that, improving agricultural water management in the low Syr-Darya River Basin will lead to improvement of other downstream ecosystem services sharing same water, and through the identification and valuation of main water-related ecosystem services, and targeted actions, a plan can be developed for payment for improvement of agricultural water management. The activity looks at all the benefits we get from nature, try to quantify them and finally make tradeoff decisions to maximize water productivity of the entire basin. This will enable decision makers to assess quantified tradeoffs associated with alternative water management choices. The project spent first year (2014) mapping and modeling the processes in the ecosystem. Second year (2015) will be utilized in simulating tradeoff scenarios under which Ag water productivity shall increase, pollution shall reduce and more water shall be diverted to fragile, vulnerable ecosystems to improve their service delivery to dependent people.