Evaluation of Agricultural Sustainability Indicators Under Climate Change and Water Resources Management Scenarios in Aji Chay Basin

This study investigated the basin sustainability in the baseline and climate change status. Then the effects of water resources management scenarios such as agricultural water reducing, increasing irrigation efficiency and increasing the water price on sustainability indicators were investigated.

A hydro-economic model was used to evaluate the effects of climate change on hydrological and economic variables. Modeling of hydrologic behavior was performed by WEAP-MABIA model and economic behavior using quadratic risk programming. The LARS-WG downscaling model was used to simulate climate change under three future emission scenarios (A2, A1B and B1), for the period 2020-2050. Agricultural sustainability was evaluated using performance criteria such as reliability, resilience, vulnerability and the irrigation water deficit index.

Evaluation of the sustainability indicators in the current situation indicates the instability of water resource and under climate change conditions, the hydrological basin status will be more critical that it goes from 0.86 in the basin situation to 0.72 under A2 climate change scenario. Implementing water resource management scenarios improves the sustainability indicators compared to climate change and the largest increase is related to the increasing irrigation efficiency scenario. In this scenario, the average of agricultural sustainability compared to climate change increases by 11.1% and irrigation water deficit index decreases by 26.6%, which It indicates the improvement of the region sustainability.

Due to the high effectiveness of the increasing irrigation efficiency scenario, it was recommended to increase irrigation efficiency by changing irrigation technology and using modern irrigation methods.