Abstract
Water is a fundamental component in primary food production, whether it be rainfall, irrigation used to water crops, or for supplying drinking water for animals, while the amount of water in the soil determines it capacity to support machinery and animals. We identify that UK agriculture is exposed to five main water-related risks: agricultural drought, scarcity of water resources, restrictions on the right to abstract water, excess soil water, and inundation. Projected milder, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers by the end of the century will change the frequency, persistence, or severity of each of these risks. This paper critically reviews and synthesizes the scientific literature on the impact of these risks on primary food production and the technological and managerial strategies employed to build resilience to these changing risks. At the farm scale, the emphasis has been on strategies to build robustness to reduce the impact of a water-related risk. However, collaborative partnerships allow for a more optimal allocation of water during times of scarcity. Enhancing cross-scale interactions, learning opportunities, and catchment-scale autonomy will be key to ensuring the agricultural system can build adaptive and transformational capacity.
Highlights
At a conceptual level, resilience refers to the ability of a system to cope well with changing circumstances, including both predictable and unpredictable shocks and stresses
The term resilience has become extensively used in the context of agricultural production, climate change, and water security, but often without clear definition
During periods of hydrological drought agricultural abstractors with ‘spray irrigation’ licences may be subject to emergency restrictions on the timing or volumes of water abstracted under Section 57 of the Water Resources Act [28], so-called
Summary
Resilience refers to the ability of a system to cope well with changing circumstances, including both predictable and unpredictable shocks and stresses. We are concerned here with the actions that may be taken by stakeholders to increase the resilience of agriculture to continue to produce food in the face of changing water-related risks. These actions may help to absorb the impact and resist change (robustness or persistence), to return to normal more quickly following shock, to undertake preparations to limit the impacts of such an event in future (recovery or adaptability), or to change to a different condition that is at least as desirable as the original (re-orientation or transformability) [1,3,9]. Through a critical review and synthesis of the scientific literature, this paper evaluates the range of on-farm responses, or adaptations, necessary to build increased resilience to these emergent risks
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