Dissertation
CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS ON AGRICULTURAL WATER SUPPLY AND DEMAND, IRRIGATION EFFICIENCY AND FARMERS’ ADAPTATION DECISIONS: A CASE STUDY OF THE YAKIMA RIVER BASIN
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2016
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/117465
Abstract
Climate change impacts the agriculture through a myriad of ways: e.g., through elevated CO2, higher temperatures and an altered water cycle. Although climate change can positively impact agriculture, in many parts of the world the overall direction of these impacts are expected to be negative, potentially threatening the food security of the world’s increasing population. To minimize climate change’s negative consequences, farmers are likely to take adaptive actions. However, these actions may also result in unintended consequences for food supply and other sectors of industry, such as those that also rely on surface water availability. The overarching objective of this research is to develop the understanding of complex interactions between climate, the hydrologic cycle, crop growth and phenology, and human decision making over the Western United States. To satisfy this overall objective we performed the following:
• developed a tightly coupled modeling platform (VIC-CropSyst) which mechanistically simulates hydrologic processes at the regional scale while capturing agricultural processes and management at field scales; this framework allows us to investigate the interactions among water/energy cycles and crop management in agricultural river basins (Chapter One),
• embedded an irrigation module into VIC-CropSyst for mechanistic simulate of irrigation losses and to assess the impact of climate change on the efficiency of irrigation systems (Chapter Two), and
• developed a hydrologic-agricultural-economic modeling platform that simulates how farmers’ investment decisions into more efficient irrigation technology may be impacted by climate change (Chapter Three).
The case study area is Washington State’s Yakima River Basin (YRB), a watershed in the western U.S.’s that is representative of other heavily irrigated agricultural basins that are sensitive to climate change. The results indicate that the severity and frequency of droughts are increasing in the YRB; this provides financial incentives for farmers to switch to new irrigation systems. The results also show that climate change causes an increase in irrigation evaporative losses with a decrease in reusable non-evaporative losses, thus reducing future return flows and causing further water stress for downstream water users.
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Details
- Title
- CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS ON AGRICULTURAL WATER SUPPLY AND DEMAND, IRRIGATION EFFICIENCY AND FARMERS’ ADAPTATION DECISIONS: A CASE STUDY OF THE YAKIMA RIVER BASIN
- Creators
- Keyvan Malek
- Contributors
- Claudio Stockle (Advisor)Claudio Stockle (Committee Member)Jennifer Adam (Advisor)Jennifer Adam (Committee Member)Troy Peters (Committee Member)Michael Brady (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of Biological Systems Engineering
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 180
- Identifiers
- 99900581830801842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation