Green and Blue Water Footprint Accounting for Dry Beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) in Primary Region of Mexico

Lucia Lopez,Carlos Bautista-Capetillo

doi:10.3390/su7033001

Abstract

Water shortages are a key obstacle to the sustainable supply of food to the world population, since agriculture has the largest consumptive water use. The Water Footprint (WF) has been developed as a useful tool to assess the contribution of goods and activities to water scarcity. This concept is being used around the world to improve agricultural water management. This paper analyzes climate data in order to estimate green and blue WFs for dry beans in the dry beans primary region of Mexico under both irrigation and dryland conditions. The quantification of green WF is very important in this area, since 95% of the crop is obtained in dryland conditions. Standard methodology was used to assess the crop WF. Five different sowing dates were considered: two for irrigation (15 April and 15 May) and three for dryland (1 and 15 July and 1 August). It was found that the optimum sowing date for dryland conditions is 1 August, with a WF of 1839 m3·Mg−1 (1 Mg equal to 1000 kg) in the sutheastern part of the region; nevertheless, results show that the largest green water availability occurs around the first days of July. Under irrigated conditions the best sowing date is 15 May, with a decrease in crop evapotranspiration of 10.1% in relation to 15 April; which means a reduction of 36.1% of blue water use in the northwestern region mainly.

Highlights

Increasing world population brings about environmental problems, such as resource scarcity, pollution, erosion, and deforestation
Such analyses have been reported to lead to improvements in agricultural water management policies [1] by implementing strategies to reduce effects that on environmental resources could provoke people, organizations and products since it is critical for sustainability [2]
This study evaluates the volume of green and blue water utilized in dry beans production following the methodology proposed by Hoekstra et al [3]

Summary

Introduction

Increasing world population brings about environmental problems, such as resource scarcity, pollution, erosion, and deforestation. Agriculture stands as the largest consumptive water user worldwide: it needs massive amounts of water to produce agricultural products When it comes to producing crops under water stress conditions, detailed analyses are required to characterize water requirements (evapotranspiration losses and water use efficiency) and water availability. Such analyses have been reported to lead to improvements in agricultural water management policies [1] by implementing strategies to reduce effects that on environmental resources could provoke people, organizations and products since it is critical for sustainability [2]. This term can be defined as the total volume of freshwater used during the production and consumption of goods and services, measured at the place where the product was produced [5,6]

Methods

Results

Conclusion