Digital management of irrigation water and agriculture: Transparency and accountability towards resilience and sustainable development

Alamanos, Angelos and Koundouri, Phoebe and Papadaki, Lydia and Pliakou, Tatiana (2022): Digital management of irrigation water and agriculture: Transparency and accountability towards resilience and sustainable development. Published in:

Abstract

This research reflects the outcomes from an ongoing project based on continuous collaboration (stakeholder engagement) and scientific support towards sustainable and resilient water management. A multi-disciplinary platform is used to bring together all relevant stakeholders of Thessaly, a Greek rural region facing multiple water management problems, historically. The problems, causes and potential solutions are analysed in a series of virtual meetings (March 2021 - June 2022) in order to develop business plan(s) for the improvement of the situation in multiple levels. A basic result from the project so far, a commonly acceptable measure, refers to the digital agriculture-irrigation water management, which has multiple benefits and enhances resilience to different future challenges. Such measures are supported by the international practice, research, and policy agendas: Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and interactive maps have been used successfully for agricultural monitoring and management in the context of informed decision-making (Jhariya 2019) and guidance for targeted measures (Mockler et al. 2016), while they support the use (and adaptation) of new technologies by multiple users (Mustafi et al. 2021). The main objective of this work is to analyse the multiple benefits of such digital management tools from a new perspective: as a means for transparency and accountability to speed up progress and support informed decisions, as resulted from a multi-disciplinary stakeholder group. The methodology developed and followed for this project, the way of reaching to common visions, and the proposed actions for the specific study area are the novel elements of this work.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: water management, Geographical Information Systems, agricultural monitoring, Greek Ministry of Environment
• Subjects: Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics ; Environmental and Ecological Economics > Q0 - General > Q00 - General; Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics ; Environmental and Ecological Economics > Q1 - Agriculture; Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics ; Environmental and Ecological Economics > Q1 - Agriculture > Q14 - Agricultural Finance

References

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Alamanos A, Rolston A, Papaioannou G (2021) Development of a Decision Support System for Sustainable Environmental Management and Stakeholder Engagement. Hydrology, 8(1), 40. https://doi.org/10.3390/hydrology8010040

Jhariya DC (2019) Assessment of Groundwater Pollution Vulnerability Using GIS-Based DRASTIC Model and its Validation Using Nitrate Concentration in Tandula Watershed, Chhattisgarh. Journal of the Geological Society of India, 93(5), 567–573. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12594-019-1218-5

Mockler E, Deakin J, Archbold M, Daly D, Bruen M (2016) Nutrient load apportionment to support the identification of appropriate water framework directive measures. Biology and Environment: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 116B(3), 245–263. https://doi.org/10.3318/bioe.2016.22

Mustafi S, Ghosh P, Roy K, Dan S, Mukherjee K, Nath Mandal S (2021) Drones for Intelligent Agricultural Management. In Krause & F. Xhafa (Eds.), IoT-based Intelligent Modelling for Environmental and Ecological Engineering: IoT Next Generation EcoAgro Systems, Springer International Publishing. pp. 81–100. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030- 71172-6_4