WATER FOOTPRINT AS A TOOL OF WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT – REVIEW

Abstract

Water is essential for live, freshwater supplies around the world are under significant pressure because of increasing consumption and pollution. Egypt suffers from water scarcity due to the increase in the population and the lack of integrated management of water resources, resulting in a gap between the available water resources and the required water consumption. Many studies were done to improve irrigated agriculture's efficiency on water consumption and crop yields for saving water in irrigated agriculture to achieve water management sustainability. Therefore, the aim of this work is reviewing of the previous studies of crop water footprint accounting as a diagnostic tool to identify the hotspots of irrigated agricultural systems Water footprint as one of the tools of integrated water management. The water footprint (WF), which is an indicator that includes both direct and indirect water use, is a metric for determining how much freshwater a product consumes during its life cycle. It helps in providing water quantities to obtain the highest water efficiency to obtain the highest return of one cubic meter of water. And, it also helps to improve the strategies of sustainable agriculture and the structure of international trade. Water footprint necessitates the need to integrate water resources management policies agricultural and trade policies to feed in a comprehensive country water accounting system.