New Water Policy and Practice Issue 4, Number 1, Fall 2017 | Page 66

New Water Policy & Practice Journal
Usually the rains begin in mid-September, when the sowing begins.
This year the fall–winter sowing had to be delayed due to high temperatures
and lack of rainfall. So, agriculture has to adapt to climate change, such as
to the growing scarcity of water it has generated. Cultural techniques must
change, the crops’ and animals’ selection, soils, fertilization, everything has
to be adapted to the abrupt changes that we are already seeing.
The PhD Project
The PhD project proposed aims to, as a first goal, assess the water use effi-
ciency for irrigation (surface and groundwater as in Watto 2013), from its
abstraction, by the responsible authorities (Water Use Associations), to its
use by farmers, in mainland Portugal and proposes methodologies to im-
prove this water use efficiency, taking into account the climate projections in
the long run (Christensen et al. 2007).
The second major objective of the proposed PhD work is an analysis
of water tariff for agriculture (Crase et al. 2015) and its restructuring, taking
into account the water use efficiency for agricultural purposes aforemen-
tioned.
It intends to analyze the current situation of water use for agricul-
tural purposes considering socioeconomic characterization; soil and climate
characterization; cultures variability analysis; characterization of the avail-
ability of surface water and groundwater; characterization of the water re-
quirements of crops; market characterization of agriculture water; current
cost of water for agricultural purposes; determination of irrigation water use
efficiency and its analysis.
Completing the characterization of the current situation, we intend to
propose strategies to improve water use efficiency for agricultural purposes.
Within these there are:
•
Proposals for restructuring the pricing of agricultural water by river
basin, where the price determined by supply agent will have important
implications for land use for irrigation activities (Perry 2001a). Only
crops that have