Our research strategy focuses on a number of themes as given below.
Harvest for Food
Better water utilization in African agriculture is key to securing harvests, increasing yields and accelerate economic growth in rural areas. This projects supports African partners in using water harvesting and buffering potential, fair and equitable distribution of the available water, using new and highly efficient irrigation techniques and saving ecosystems. Zambia is among the countries where the available erratic rainfall can be combined with appropriate land use and investments in high production areas and is working with the IWRM team.
Greening the Desert
Water productivity in water scarce regions needs to be enhanced to enable an efficient allocation of the water resources. This requires cooperation of the private sector with knowledge institutes and government authorities to create the needed environment for innovations. Our research agenda for this project is both curiosity driven as well as demand driven. We try to find answers to questions such as:
- What factors are important for creating an enabling environment for innovations to increase water productivity?
- Which demand management measures and policies are effective to produce more with less water?
- How can we value ecological and social benefits of water in water scarce environments?
Our main geographical focus is the Middle East and Mediterranean region. For implementation of our projects we link to other research groups within Alterra and within Wageningen UR.
Risk-environmental-ecological analysis
A sustainable future for the Mediterranean requires sufficient renewable water sources of good quality for drinking, food (irrigation), industry and natural wetlands. Water demand management, increasing water efficiency, water saving, sanitation and reuse of purified waste water are necessary to compensate for population and economic growth within sustainable limits. Special attention is needed for ecological criteria of temporary Mediterranean streams in order to comply with the Water Framework Directive of the EU and to reach the necessary resilience of the aquatic system.