Joint assessment of water and agricultural policies: a Pan-European multidimensional modelling approach

Irrigation water use by agriculture has been identified as one of the major sustainable water management issues in the implementation of the Water Framework Directive in Europe. While the strong linkages between water, food, and the environment call for an integrated and multidisciplinary modelling approach, a complete and consistent modelling system to evaluate food-water relationships in Europe was missing so far. This paper therefore develops a simulation framework to jointly assess agricultural and water policies and discusses first result. The partial equilibrium model for agriculture CAPRI (Britz and Witzke 2011), combining a global market model with regionalized supply side models for European administrative regions, has been extended with a module for irrigated agriculture to complement its existing environmental indicators and agri-environmental modelling capabilities. This modelling framework enables analyzing the likely impacts of increasing water stress on agricultural production at the level of administrative NUTS2 regions, as well as looking at the sustainable use of water, the implementation of water policies or the integration of water issues in the Common Agricultural Policy. This innovative approach has been tested in a pilot case study including two regions (Andalucia in Spain and Midi-Pyrenees in France), selected according to data availability. The paper discusses the methodological and data issues, and presents preliminary results, highlighting the interrelations between water and agricultural developments in Europe. We find that incorporating water issues in EU-wide agro-economic models is crucial to analyse future agricultural policies in a context of climate change and increasing pressure on water resources.

BLANCO Maria;  BRITZ Wolfgang;  WITZKE Heinz Peter;  VAN DOORSLAER Benjamin; 

2013-11-13

Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (MAICh)

JRC84001

http://eaae.maich.gr/133eaae/docs/133eaae_abstracts_book.pdf,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC84001,