Irrigation in the Earth System: A new transdisciplinary effort to enhance understanding of coupled natural-human systems

Abstract:

While there exists a long history of irrigation research across many disciplines, including (among others) the crop, hydrological, and climate sciences, these research communities often make simplifying assumptions about irrigation processes lying outside of their disciplines. This restricts our ability to fully characterize irrigation interactions in complex, coupled natural-human systems. Under rapidly intensifying human demand and global climatic change, it is urgent that we better represent and quantify these feedbacks in order to comprehensively evaluate and predict current and future water resources. New observational data and modeling capacities—for the Earth system as a whole as well as component sectors (e.g., agriculture, ecosystems, hydrology, climate, and economy)—are enabling multi-scale impact assessments of irrigation under increasing pressure from growing population and global environmental change, as well as its interactions with natural ecosystems.

While some coordination exists among and between the various research sectors dealing with irrigation (e.g., the Inter-Sectoral Impacts Model Intercomparison Project), we present a complementary dedicated framework for convergent irrigation research. This effort—Irrigation in the Earth System (IES)—leverages expertise, capabilities, and existing research plans across multiple disciplines to enable transdisciplinary, holistic inquiry into irrigation’s role in coupled natural-human systems. For example, the question of how irrigation can be sustainably balanced with other uses in a changing climate will be informed by integrating knowledge from crop modeling (how much water will crops need?), climate and hydrological models (how much water will be available for human use overall?), models of various sectors related to society and the environment (how much water will be needed for other human uses and for ecosystems?), and experts in technology and development (what is the economic capacity for expanding irrigation, and how efficient are various techniques?).

Here, we will present the general framework of IES, detailing how we envision the effort improving irrigation datasets and models of irrigation-Earth system interactions while contributing knowledge that can be applied to pressing societal needs.