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Water Management and Environment
Balancing water for food and ecosystems
This research theme seeks to identify and test interventions that safeguard the environment and associated delivery of ecosystem services vital to human well-being, while enhancing land and water resources management for agriculture.
Key Research Areas:
- Addressing environmental water requirements in basins:
To develop, test and apply best practice frameworks that enable explicit inclusion of the environment as a sector in basin water resources development and management, and within these frameworks further develop and apply methodologies to determine and implement the water requirements of aquatic ecosystems.
- Enhancing benefits in agriculture-wetlands interactions:
To identify, contextualize and promote the application of improved policies and practices for water management in agriculture across the full spectrum — from large-scale irrigation to small-scale rain-fed systems that contribute to agricultural production and poverty alleviation while simultaneously minimizing wetland ecosystem degradation.
- Valuing contributions of ecosystem services to livelihoods:
To assess and demonstrate the economic value and contributions of the diverse range of ecosystem services to basin land and water productivity, poverty alleviation and livelihoods strategies; and to improve understanding of the tradeoffs with food production so as to ensure sustainable benefits for people and ecosystems.
Theme Overview
Healthy and resilient aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems provide a diverse range of services to humans that are essential in securing food and livelihoods security, especially of the rural and peri-urban poor. However, such ecosystems typically remain poorly integrated within land and water resources management systems. Further, the factors required for the maintenance of system ecological character are seldom met and the overall socioeconomic value of ecosystems to people living in basins across the world is underestimated. As a result, many ecosystems, in particular inland and coastal wetlands, are subject to increasing degradation, with serious attendant implications for human well-being, especially in the longer-term. Agriculture and irrigation, in particular, have been singled out as major drivers, reducing the capacity of the ecosystems they alter to deliver services to people, so that inevitably, continued widespread degradation will threaten the very sustainability of agricultural systems themselves. As in the case of human health, environmental concerns have often been neglected in the move towards rapid development. Yet, unless issues of environment sustainability are firmly placed on the water and land resources and agricultural agendas, we risk marginalizing a critical element of the broader landscape supporting agriculture and pathways out of poverty and extreme hunger.
The development of IWMI’s research interests in the ecological aspects of water resources development and agricultural management in river (as well as aquifer or lake) basins arose out of the realization that water and its uses had to be considered in a broader integrated management context, and that all aspects of water use (agricultural, domestic, energy, industrial, and environmental) needed to be taken into account in water resources policies. IWMI’s research to date has focused primarily on the impacts of irrigated agricultural development on downstream coastal wetlands, issues surrounding the sustainable use of inland wetlands for food production, estimation of the environmental water requirements of river systems, and issues of biodiversity conservation in multifunctional landscapes through the implementation of ecoagriculture principles.
The Water Management and Environment theme, builds on the agriculture-environment research in the former IWMI research theme Water, Health and Environment. The new theme focuses on the integration of ecosystems and their water requirements in basin water resources development and management; enhanced integration of policies and practices of the water resource, agriculture and environmental sectors; and improved recognition of the economic value of ecosystem services and their contribution to land and water productivity, and hence, food and livelihoods security.
Beneficiaries
- Governmental and municipal planners and agencies concerned with policies and practices for water and land resources management.
- Environmental authorities.
- Water user associations.
- Farmer organizations and related civil society organizations.
- Universities and Research Institutes.
- Local and international NGOs.
- Agencies and programs.
- International conventions and their contracting parties.