Agriculture is intrinsically dependent on water and increasingly exposed to growing water-related risks. These include water shortages, excess water and inadequate water quality, alongside systemic risks of degraded freshwater ecosystems and a destabilised water cycle.
Trade can be a channel for impacts from agricultural water risks but also a mechanism to alleviate water risks. Countries may be exposed to water risks beyond their borders via their imports of agri-food products. At the same time, the ability to access goods on international markets reduces vulnerability to food insecurity and can relieve pressure on local water demand.
Effective policy responses require a holistic understanding of water risks that accounts for both blue water resources, such as rivers, lakes and aquifers, and green water resources, including soil moisture and land-sourced rainfall, while understanding the role of cross-border linkages.
Given the diverse water risks and decision contexts, the agricultural sector requires a suite of tools tailored to different risks, spatial scales and timeframes. From remote sensing to machine learning, the tools to assess agricultural water risks are advancing rapidly, yet gaps and challenges remain:
Moving from hazard monitoring to meaningful assessments of impacts on agriculture remains difficult, as this requires the integration of hydrological, agronomic and socio-economic data which are not always available or compatible.
Several critical dimensions of water risk – such as freshwater ecosystem health, groundwater depletion and land-atmosphere interactions – remain difficult to measure and monitor and are, therefore, insufficiently covered by existing tools.
There can be a mismatch between the scale of available data and the scale at which decisions are made (field level, basin level etc.).
Water risks frequently compound and cascade over time, yet most assessment tools analyse hazards in isolation.
For water risk intelligence to deliver value, assessment tools must be effectively embedded in decision making. Tools are most useful when applied at critical decision points where the costs of poor or irreversible choices are high. At the same time, tools can be costly to develop and operate. Decision makers need to ensure that investments in water risk assessment deliver a proportionate return and are matched to the decision context.
There is no single acceptable level of water risk, and context-specific approaches that consider different risk thresholds are needed. Public authorities can provide a long-term and holistic perspective on water risks. As a framework-setter, governments can encourage the uptake of water risk intelligence by promoting a more mature data environment, setting clear governance and co-ordination structures, and encouraging knowledge and technology transfer to the agricultural sector.
Anticipating and monitoring water risks for agriculture
