Balancing smart irrigation and hydropower investments for sustainable water conservation in the Indus basin

18027 10 97925 4 301414 document 97925 Balancing_paper_new.pdf application/pdf f89889cfbfa763f6ddedf67e9244f30b MD5 5759016 2022-05-30 13:23:54 https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/18027/1/Balancing_paper_new.pdf 18027 1 1 application/pdf text en public cc_by_nc_nd_4

Balancing_paper_new.pdf

2024-05-23 accepted 97926 2 301390 document 97926 lightbox.jpg image/png 7edfe863a354f539046919e8018e4be1 MD5 45801 2022-05-30 12:07:45 https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/18027/2/lightbox.jpg 18027 2 2 image/png other Thumbnails conversion from text to thumbnail_lightbox en staffonly

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http://eprints.org/relation/isVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/97925 http://eprints.org/relation/isVolatileVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/97925 http://eprints.org/relation/isIndexCodesVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/97925 archive 353 disk0/00/01/80/27 2022-05-30 07:44:30 2024-05-23 03:00:05 2022-05-30 07:44:30 article show Ilyas A. Parkinson S. 2028 0000-0002-4753-5198 Vinca A. 2193 0000-0002-3051-178X Byers E. 2115 0000-0003-0349-5742 Manzoor T. Riahi K. 1696 0000-0001-7193-3498 Willaarts B. 2156 0000-0001-6589-1543 Siddiqi A. Muhammad A. Balancing smart irrigation and hydropower investments for sustainable water conservation in the Indus basin pub BNR WAT ECE IACC S3 TISS prog_ysp Integrated assessment modeling; Irrigation efficiency; River basin management; Smart irrigation and hydropower; Systems integration; Transformation pathways; Water-energy-land nexus Indus River Basin (IRB) region of South Asia is severely water-stressed with irrigation receiving 90–95% of total surface water allocations and depletion of fossil groundwater reserves of more than 30 km3/year. Simultaneously, many supply-driven hydropower reservoirs, are planned in the basin. The reservoirs constructed upstream inflict severe environmental damages and reduce water availability for irrigation downstream. Policymakers promote smart technologies as a demand-based solution to reduce water consumption in irrigation. However, the effects of such technologies are not yet well understood, and unintended consequences (such as irrigation efficiency paradox and other nexus externalities) have recently begun to appear. Therefore, we use an integrated assessment model to analyze the proliferation of smart technologies in the IRB. The analysis suggests that if the Indus countries adopt a demand-based approach and irrigate their land completely using smart technologies, surface and groundwater withdrawals are indeed reduced. However, this reduction comes with a 33% increase in total expenditures, an increase in consumption across water and energy sectors, and higher withdrawals from fossil groundwater reserves. On the other hand, we find that if the countries were to balance their investments between smart and hydropower technologies it would not only reduce the increment in expenditure to 28%, but would also conserve irrigation water while avoiding the increased multi-sectoral consumption and environmental degradation. Thus, balancing investments between smart irrigation and hydropower projects can significantly reduce the economic and environmental (including conservation of water resources, meeting environmental flow targets, among others) costs of multi-sector water conservation in the IRB. 2022-09 published Elsevier 10.1016/j.envsci.2022.04.012 225 2965 2585 250 2921 public Environmental Science & Policy 135 147-161 TRUE 1873-6416 no info:eu-repo/semantics/article