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Water planning and governance strategies must adapt to challenges associated with population growth, climate change, and projected water shortages. In the Western United States, agriculture is the dominant water use, and agricultural water users are being asked to conserve or share their water with other uses. Managing scarce water supplies at the local level often involves creative solutions, many of which are not well documented, especially in the agricultural sector. It is therefore critical to understand ideas to manage scarce water resources from the perspective of agricultural water users and those who work with them. In our research, we used interviews to explore how agricultural water users are managing increasing water scarcity in the Middle Rio Grande basin of central New Mexico and what enables or prevents them from taking innovative action to manage water scarcity. We hypothesized that we would find undocumented water use innovations born out of water users’ responses to lower and more variable water availability in recent years. We primarily recruited interviewees through snowball sampling, with a total of 42 (47%) agricultural water users, decision makers, and non-profit leaders influencing agricultural water governance in the basin accepting our invitation to participate. Our approximately one-hour, semi-structured and open-ended interviews explored agricultural water users’ lived experiences with water governance and opportunities to manage water scarcity. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed using HyperRESEARCH software (version 4.5.4). Our results did not support our hypothesis. Instead, we found that agricultural water users struggled to implement well-known innovations amid the pressures of water scarcity, supply uncertainty, administrative complexity, and constraints on their time, labor, and money. Water users and decision makers were mutually interested in implementing innovations in crop choice, flexibility in water storage, use, and management, stricter enforcement of water use efficiency, and access to more efficient irrigation equipment. However, high costs, a lack of knowledge, education, and training, and challenges related to water distribution and scheduling prevented agricultural water users from accessing these and other innovations. Recommendations include incentive-based policies to promote agricultural water use innovations that require high initial costs, improved water accounting at the basin and regional levels to promote flexible and reliable access to agricultural water, targeted education and outreach programming on alternative irrigation methods and cropping patterns, and improved access to irrigation scheduling information to support agricultural water users in planning for water scarcity.
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Integrated Policy Solutions for Water Scarcity in Agricultural Communities of the American Southwest
The conventional approach of policy interventions in water management that focus on the portions of the system that directly relate to water often lead to unintended consequences that potentially exacerbate water scarcity issues and present challenges to the future viability of many rural agricultural communities. This paper deploys a system dynamics model to illustrate how expanding the policy space of hydrology models to include socioeconomic feedbacks could address these challenges. In this regard, policies that can potentially mitigate general water scarcity in a region of the American Southwest in southern New Mexico are examined. We selected and tested policies with the potential to diminish water scarcity without compromising the system’s economic performance. These policies included supporting choices that reduce or limit the expansion of water-intensive crops, promoting workforce participation, encouraging investment in capital, and regulating land use change processes. The simulation results, after the proposed boundary expansion, unveiled intervention options not commonly exercised by water decision-makers, bolstering the argument that integrated approaches to water research that include socioeconomic feedbacks are crucial for the study of agricultural community resilience.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1739835
- PAR ID:
- 10296060
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Systems
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2079-8954
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 26
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/systems9020026
