18,720 research outputs found

    Irrigation and poverty alleviation: review of the empirical evidence

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    Irrigated farming, Poverty, Conflict, Participatory management, Farmer participation, Environmental effects, Asia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka

    A Review of Soil-Improving Cropping Systems for Soil Salinization

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    A major challenge of the Sustainable Development Goals linked to Agriculture, Food Security, and Nutrition, under the current global crop production paradigm, is that increasing crop yields often have negative environmental impacts. It is therefore urgent to develop and adopt optimal soil-improving cropping systems (SICS) that can allow us to decouple these system parameters. Soil salinization is a major environmental hazard that limits agricultural potential and is closely linked to agricultural mismanagement and water resources overexploitation, especially in arid climates. Here we review literature seeking to ameliorate the negative effect of soil salinization on crop productivity and conduct a global meta-analysis of 128 paired soil quality and yield observations from 30 studies. In this regard, we compared the effectivity of different SICS that aim to cope with soil salinization across 11 countries, in order to reveal those that are the most promising. The analysis shows that besides case-specific optimization of irrigation and drainage management, combinations of soil amendments, conditioners, and residue management can contribute to significant reductions of soil salinity while significantly increasing crop yields. These results highlight that conservation agriculture can also achieve the higher yields required for upscaling and sustaining crop production

    The SADC Groundwater Data and Information Archive, Knowledge Sharing and Co-operation Project. Final report

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    The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Groundwater Data and Information Archive, Knowledge Sharing and Co-operation Project, funded by the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) and Department for International Development, UK (DFID), was initiated in September 2009 to identify, catalogue and subsequently promote access to the large collection of reports held in the UK by the British Geological Survey (BGS). The work has focused on a wealth of unpublished so-called “grey” data and information which describes groundwater occurrence and development in Southern Africa and was gathered by the BGS over its many decades of involvement in the region. The project has four main aims: To catalogue and describe the "grey data" documents on SADC groundwater held by the BGS within a digital metadatabase. To identify a sub-set of scanned documents to be made freely available to groundwater practitioners and managers in the SADC region by electronic distribution. To link the metadatabase and digital sub-set of documents via a web portal hosted by the BGS, to enable download of documents by SADC groundwater workers. To strengthen links between BGS hydrogeologists with counterparts in SADC, and provide an example of groundwater data sharing which could be emulated by other European Geological Surveys with substantial data holdings on SADC groundwater. The project has successfully met these aims. The assessment of BGS archived material produced an electronic meta-database describing 1735 items held in hard copy. Of these, 1041 have been scanned digitally to searchable Portable Document Format (PDF) format. A subset of 655 PDFs including partial documents related to groundwater development from the colonial and post independence period as well as BGS internal project reports and reports approved for web dissemination by host countries are now available to download (free of charge) at http://www.SADCgroundwaterarchive.com . Initial results indicate a good deal of interest both from within SADC and elsewhere, accessed by directly addressing the website and via a search engine such as Google. The information presented has already been used by in-region projects such as the SADC Hydrogeological Mapping project and the Malawi Water Assessment Project. This is essentially a pilot project providing an example of how Web delivery of the archive is an important step forward for the well-being of the SADC region. It permits access to documents few even new existed and will, it is hoped, provide a valuable dataset that should inhibit the temptation to waste scarce resources by ‘re-inventing the wheel’

    Dams

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    The construction of large dams is one of the most costly and controversial forms of public infrastructure investment in developing countries, but little is known about their impact. This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large dams in India. To account for endogenous placement of dams we use GIS data and the fact that river gradient affects a district's suitability for dams to provide instrumental variable estimates of their impact. We find that, in a district where a dam is built, agricultural production does not increase but poverty does. In contrast, districts located downstream from the dam benefit from increased irrigation and see agricultural production increase and poverty fall. Overall, our estimates suggest that large dam construction in India is a marginally cost-effective investment with significant distributional implications, and has, in aggregate, increased poverty.

    The management of inter-state rivers as demands grow and supplies tighten: India, China, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh

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    International cooperation over the major rivers in South Asia took a new turn with the signing in 1996 and 1997 of five innovative water, power and economic cooperation agreements. The innovations include four elements: (i) the transfer of some previously diplomatic questions into the sphere of the private economy, (ii) bringing third parties, other than governments, into the design and negotiation of cooperative projects, (iii) the principle of sharing costs and benefits, and (iv) taking steps toward multilateral discussion. However, political and implementation challenges have remained, and have been exacerbated by looming water shortages as economies grow and climate change occurs. This paper examines how recent innovations in diplomacy may be extended to address these challenges.international rivers, South Asia, multi-track diplomacy, cooperation

    Dams

    Get PDF
    The construction of large dams is one of the most costly and controversial forms of public infrastructure investment in developing countries, but little is known about their impact. This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large dams in India. To account for endogenous placement of dams we use GIS data and the fact that river gradient affects a district's suitability for dams to provide instrumental variable estimates of their impact. We find that, in a district where a dam is built, agricultural production does not increase but poverty does. In contrast, districts located downstream from the dam benefit from increased irrigation and see agricultural production increase and poverty fall. Overall, our estimates suggest that large dam construction in India is a marginally cost-effective investment with significant distributional implications, and has, in aggregate, increased poverty.Dams, Development Planning, Program Evaluation, India

    Role of nongovernmental organizations in the improvement of minor irrigation systems in Sri Lanka: Proceedings of a Workshop held at Digana Village, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 17-18 March 1989

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    Non-governmental organizations / Irrigation systems / Rehabilitation / Rural development / Farmer participation / Small scale systems / Sri Lanka

    What Do We Know about Gender and Other Social Impacts of IWS Projects?: A Literature Review

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    The approach of this short literature review is to look firstly at what the literature has to say about wider social impacts of "investing in watershed services" (IWS) projects or programs and, secondly, to examine more specifically the gender issues. The term IWS is used in this paper as a convenient shorthand while realizing that this is a controversial term and that there is a case for using other terms such as "payments for watershed services", "reciprocal arrangements in watershed service provision" or "compensation for provision of watershed services." In the interest of brevity, this discussion is not entered into except to say that the term IWS is used here in a broad and inclusive way similar to "IWS-like schemes" as used in the Bellagio Conversations (Asquith & Wunder 2008)
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