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 food grain demand per person 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.

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.