Accounting for the water interconnectedness within Mediterranean catchments under water shortage crisis and global changes – AQUEDUCT

Agriculture, both rainfed and irrigated, along with forest cover, emerges as the sectors using the most water in many Mediterranean countries. To address drought and water scarcity in Mediterranean catchments, one solution is to manage water demand and use by crop and forest covers. This entails:
i) Enhancing water-use efficiency in rainfed agriculture through improved farming systems (such as biodiversification including agroforestry and intercropping) or landscape diversification (land use, terraces, etc.); ii) implementing new irrigation technologies and water allocation rules in irrigated areas; iii) implementing changes in forested ecosystems, such as afforestation or planting drought tolerant tree species. Another adaptation strategy involves increasing water supply, achieved by augmenting water stored in strategic dams or constructing local small reservoirs. These reservoirs enable farmers to access local (blue) water resources for small-scale irrigation. Regardless of the solution chosen, comprehensive and sustainable water management necessitates the development of local water accounts detailing stocks, fluxes, demands, and use within the area of implementation. Additionally, accurate water information is crucial to understanding the global impact of the chosen solution on other water user sectors and to feeding a multisector and transparent governance. Acquiring this information requires accounting for the interconnectedness of water within catchments.
In the context, the objective of the AQUEDUCT project is to develop and assess, in collaboration with stakeholders, novel methods and tools that account for the interconnectedness of water resources, fluxes, demands and uses, between spatial and temporal scales that are pertinent for agricultural and water decisions and management. The project is structured around the 4 following activity groups:
• Designing tools to characterise, understand and quantify resources, fluxes and uses of water within every of the main Mediterranean agrosystems and ecosystems. These tools leverage new sources of high-resolution spatial remote sensing data, continuous, low cost, low energy monitoring technologies, IA technology to model vegetation cover water demand and use and farmers' behavior.
• Designing tools of integrated water accounting for Mediterranean catchments. Different approaches are developed and tested from the integrated mechanistic models to dynamic system models. The modelling challenges is to build models able to provide water accounts at the spatial scales (plot, irrigated areas, forest ecosystem, catchment, aquifer) and temporal scales (growing season, hydroclimatic year, hydroclimatic crises multi-year crop rotation, long term agricultural transition, decades in relation with climate change) of interests for the diversity of stakeholders involved in water using and management.
• Providing water accounts for typical agrosystems and forested ecosystems and for typical Mediterranean catchments.
• Evaluating with stakeholders the added-value of these innovative accounting under tactical and strategic management for adaptation to water scarcity within transparent, multisectorial and fair governance framework.
Relying on 7 Mediterranean sites (1 in Italy, 1 Morocco, 2 Spain and 3 Tunisia), where accounting tools will be designed, tested and implemented in collaboration with stakeholders (farmers, farmers’ association, water users, water and land use authorities and services), the project involved an interdisciplinary approach combining biophysical and engineering disciplines (agronomy, hydrology, economy,, numerical modelling, data science and remote sensing science), as well as social sciences and humanities (economy, geography, sociology). In each site, the AQUEDUCT project relies on a network of researchers, water and land-use managers, water users’ and farmers’ associations and policy makers.