Abstract
Groundwater overdraft has consequences in the long-run for the economic and ecological sustainability of an agricultural landscape. In response to aquifer depletion, we examine the tradeoff of non-market ecosystem service benefits (e.g., groundwater supply, greenhouse gases, and surface water quality) and market returns from crops in the Lower Mississippi River Delta. Farmers may turn to conjunctive water management using on-farm reservoirs and tail water recovery when groundwater pumping becomes expensive. We use separate objectives for market returns from crops and the non-market benefits of ecosystem services to study whether on-farm reservoirs are built with optimal cropping and irrigation choices. The use of reservoirs enables the landscape to attain up to 10% higher market returns for a given level of all non-market ecosystem service benefits by lowering the costs of irrigation, increasing groundwater levels, and reducing fuel combustion and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from groundwater pumping. A landscape that internalizes both non-market ecosystem service benefits and market value from crops has 30% greater social value than a landscape where only market returns or only non-market value is optimized.
Highlights
As the cost of groundwater pumping rises in farming regions, irrigation may rely less on groundwater pumping and more on a coupled use with surface water
We investigate how conjunctive water management with on-farm reservoirs and tail-water recovery systems influences market returns from crops and non-market ecosystem service values and how this affects the tradeoff between these two objectives on an agricultural landscape
Greenhouse gas value declines by 46%, and the groundwater supply value and water quality value decline by 55% and 34%, respectively
Summary
As the cost of groundwater pumping rises in farming regions, irrigation may rely less on groundwater pumping and more on a coupled use with surface water. This dual use of groundwater and surface water is known as conjunctive water management. Both the economic and institutional aspects of conjunctive water management are well studied [1,2,3], but the influence of irrigation management on the non-market benefits of multiple ecosystem services (in particular, groundwater supply, surface water purification, and greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction) has received less attention. Tail-water recovery systems bring runoff leaving the agricultural field to a tail-water recovery pit, and this nutrient enriched tail-water from the agricultural field is pumped back to the reservoir
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