Rethinking Agricultural Water Use Efficiency and Productivity

I hate to do a post that just says "read this," but sometimes a piece of writing is so compelling there is little to add except an exhortation to engage with the thinking. A recent paper -- Water-Use Efficiency and Productivity: Rethinking the Basin Approach -- by Peter Gleick and two of his colleagues at the Pacific Institute is just such a piece.

You can get a taste of the paper in Gleick's recent blog post. There are a lot of insights in even the short blog summary. My favorite thread of the piece has to do with how rethinking the basin approach for water quantity-based issues could lead to better addressing "co-benefits" of efficiency:

*....“co-benefits” include improved water quality, reductions in water-related energy costs, elimination or delay of additional capital investments for new supply and conveyance facilities, improved instream ecological health, greater water-supply reliability during drought, and improved crop quality. *

Although we're coming at the "co-benefit" idea from a slightly different angle, many of Gleick's ideas here relate nicely to work we've been doing on bridging the gap between water quantity and water quality policy. See, for example, our October 2011 blog posting summarizing some analysis and training tools we've developed.