Agricultural Water Poverty Index for a Sustainable World

Predicting farmers’ water conservation goals and behavior in Iran: A test of social cognitive theory

“…Of these regions the Middle East is expected to be particularly badly affected with a decline in precipitation of at least 40 mm over the comming century (FAO, 2007). This prediction, along with evidence of increasing drought, has made water scarcity a critical issue in many parts of Iran (Forouzani et al, 2012;Yazdanpanah et al, 2014a,b) which is currently experiencing its most prolonged, extensive, and severe drought in over 30 years (Yazdanpanah et al, 2013b;Hayati et al, 2010). Although Iran has always had cycles of drought, a major World Bank report (Balalii et al, 2009) confirms that the current drought is different.…”

“…At the global scale, agriculture is by far the most important user of water and, as pressure on water resources increases, the need for new approaches to managing those resources is becoming more pressing (Sullivan, 2002). In the future the agricultural sector will be expected to use less water without a decrease in food production in order to feed the increasing global population (Forouzani et al, 2012). Accordingly, sustainable management of water has become an issue of major concern over the past decade.…”

“…Within the wider framework of agricultural sustainability studies, sustainable agricultural water management is an issue of major importance that needs to be taken into account at a practical level (Forouzani et al, 2012). While access to water is an important factor in agriculture production and human development (Anand, 2007), many government projects to address these challenges are based on increasing the water supply (Foltz, 2002) in particular by moving from small-scale decentralised to large scale centralised water provision through the construction of dams (Hurlimann et al, 2009;Yazdanpanah et al, 2013c).…”

Agricultural water poverty in Marvdasht County, Southern Iran

“…The AWPI, like the WPI, is composed of five main componentsresources, access, use, capacity and environment -but each one is measured with naturally different indicators. The primary studies regarding the basic concepts, framework and procedure to construct the indicators of the AWPI have been provided in detail in Forouzani & Karami (2010) and Forouzani et al (2012). The main purpose of this article is to use the case of Marvdasht County in Fars Province, Iran to demonstrate the application of the AWPI framework to study the water scarcity problem of an agricultural region.…”

“…Based on measuring a set of simple and easy-to-use indicators, it was supposed to have the potential to provide a basis for understanding the extent of water scarcity at farm or village level. A consensus of opinion from a range of stakeholders, including water engineers, water practitioners and farmers, was considered to ensure that all the relevant issues were included in the final index (Forouzani & Karami, 2010;Forouzani et al, 2012). Whereas the WPI has been successfully applied to study the link between the physical estimates of domestic water availability and socioeconomic variables to reflect poverty (Mlote et al, 2002;Lawrence et al, 2003;Cullis, 2005;Heidecke, 2006;Sullivan et al, 2006;Qiang et al, 2008;Komnenic et al, 2009;Xin et al, 2011;Jemmali & Matoussi, 2012;Pandey et al, 2012), the AWPI was designed to particularly assess the water situation in the agricultural sector by specific indicators.…”