ACCWA · Accounting for Climate Change in Water and Agriculture management

The Mediterranean and Sahel regions are among the most sensitive areas to climate change as demonstrated in many studies (IPCC, 2013). Increased rainfall variability and ET rates will compromise irrigation potential and expansion plans and increased competition and conflict over limited water resources. There are significant knowledge gaps and uncertainties about how much water will be available for a complete growing season, how much should be used for scheduling irrigation efficiently and extracted from these regions. More information regarding water use is necessary to improve agricultural planning and to manage water more efficiently at different scales: farm and catchment/irrigation district level. Over both regions, the temperature increase will cause higher evaporation and transpiration rates, decreasing soil moisture and increasing crop water requirements. The expected impact in rainfed agriculture is a decrease in yield due to heat and water stress and an increase in the likelihood of crop failure in rainfed crops for maize, millet and sorghum (Parkes et al. 2018). Ongoing changes in the socio-economic and environmental background of rainfed farmers combined with the expected population growth make timely and reliable information on rainfed crop yield and its spatial variability essential in decision-support for improving food security and livelihoods. To this end, both understanding of the long term changes (inter-annual variability) and short-term changes (intra-annual variability) are needed.Temperature and precipitation changing patterns will also increase hazards linked to environmental conditions such as droughts, floods or crop pests like locust swarms. ACCWA aims to develop the remote sensing based monitoring tools for agriculture and water and management that help risk guidance in a climate change context.