Agricultural Water Use and Economic Impacts to Food Systems Water Resources Mission Area
Categories: Primary
The USGS Agricultural Water Use and Economic Impacts to Food Systems Water Resources Mission Area focuses on studying the decision making of agricultural growers regarding water usage in the face of shifting water availability due to hydrological, regulatory, and/or economic conditions. Water scarcity and its impacts on irrigated agriculture are contextual to cropping decisions, socioeconomic conditions, institutions, and physical infrastructure of region. Consequently, it is important to broadly understand the state-of-the-art in abstracting coupled human-natural systems and specifically representations of adaptive actions.
This work seeks to better characterize and integrate the dimensions of human behavior, community and social impacts, and economic incentives into WMA water use modeling capabilities, and to also improve understanding of water supply system interconnectivity and ability to supply water under climate extremes. Working towards the integration of socioeconomics and hydrology, this project aims to
- Investigate the current “state of the science” scenario modeling approaches for water scarcity, governance structures, and impacts to water use and availability
- Analyze how alternative water availabilities influence local and state economics by studying the distributional outcomes of the previous line of inquiry.
Bridging perspectives across disciplines is critical to understanding key performance metrics at the scales of individuals, organizations (e.g., irrigation district) and regions, that integrate infrastructure, adaptive measures, and financial tools to better meet social, economic, and environmental objectives.
The proposed research will combine USGS staff expertise in hydroclimatic and numerical modeling, economics and socioeconomic impacts with hydroeconomic and agricultural modeling expertise from UCM and UCLA to develop a conceptual framework for improving integration of socioeconomic drivers and impacts with water use projections over a wide range of scenarios.