Environmental impact assessment of water-saving irrigation systems across 60 irrigation construction projects in northern China

Abstract

With increasing water shortages partly due to increasing demands, water has become a globally relevant issue especially in arid and semi-arid regions. Water-saving irrigation technologies provide new ways for improving the efficiency of water use for agricultural production. Although efficient irrigation management could lead to water savings and increased yields, the water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions during the construction of irrigation projects also puts pressure on environmental health. However, little research has considered the environmental impact of the construction process and materials. To fill this gap, the water footprint (WF) and carbon footprint (CF) of irrigation projects were calculated using life cycle assessment (LCA) methods. The results for sixty typical irrigation projects in northern China showed that the WF accounted for only 0.2–1.5% of the total agricultural WF and 2.3–8.8% of the water saved. When the WF to construct modern irrigation systems is not considered, the water-saving effects of these systems are generally overestimated by 13%. The CF for irrigation projects was 42.0% of all agricultural activities. Due to the difficulty to obtain detailed information for irrigation projects, this paper established the relationship between financial investment or area and CF for three kinds of irrigation projects. It provided a simple quantitative method for assessing its environmental impacts. By comparing environmental impacts and production benefits under different scenarios, using drip irrigation over the long-term could increase crop yield and reduce water footprint, but carbon footprint was increased at the same time. This study suggests that it is necessary to assess the environmental impacts of irrigation construction projects from a life cycle perspective rather focusing only on yield increases and reductions in irrigation amounts.