New Water Policy and Practice Issue 4, Number 1, Fall 2017 | Page 67

Water use efficiency for irrigation
of electricity, the use of personnel, materials purchasing, and contracting
of services required). If the price of water equals the economic cost, there
will be cost recovery, if it is higher, then it can pay the environmental and
scarcity costs, if it is lower there will be no recovery of the three compo-
nents of the above economic costs. Based on all this information, we will
develop proposals for restructuring the pricing of agricultural water for
the river basin district.
• Analysis of the type of incentives that the tariff structure should give to
the farmers. Currently, the incentives are within the agro-environmental
measures, more specifically the action 7.5—Efficient Use of Water (Por-
taria 50/2015), where farmers are funded up to 100% depending on the
class of irrigators and the echelon of irrigated land to which they belong.
• Strategies to reduce water losses from its abstraction to its use by farm-
ers. In this step public collective irrigated land storage, transportation
and distribution losses will be analysed, taking into account the conser-
vation status of them (Perry 2001b).
• Recommendation of the most efficient water use crops that are best suit-
ed to each river basin, using optimization models, taking into account
the tariff restructuring previously mentioned and the climate projections
in the long term.
• Proposals for adaptations and mitigations that Portugal will have to
make before the climate change scenarios, taking into account the long-
term projections.
What Have We Done?
As a first step for this PhD, we made an exhaustive review of the empirical
literature on methodologies applied to measure irrigation efficiency and dif-
ferent ways to measure the tariffs of agricultural water.
Within the scope of the first objective, a review article titled “An An-
alytical Review of Irrigation Efficiency Measured Using Deterministic and
Stochastic Models” was published in Agricultural Water Management jour-
nal (Pereira & Marques 2017).
After a long search, we found only 32 studies, at a global level, that
measure the irrigation water use efficiency, using deterministic and stochas-
tic methods.
This literature review allowed us to conclude that farms are inefficient,
to a greater or lesser degree, relatively to the irrigation water use. Of those
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