Impacts of agriculture and climate change on water resources: diagnosis and proposals for adaptation and mitigation in watersheds in different Brazilian biomes

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Photo: MEDEIROS, Daniel

A country's sovereignty is directly related to ensuring the three types of security: food, energy, and territorial security. Basically, food security and renewable energy security depend on agriculture and its water resources. Brazil, which contains about 12% of the world availability of water resources, is a privileged country in view of the possibility of using these resources in different sectors, of which the agricultural sector, as a broad concept that involves agriculture, husbandry, and forestry, has the largest demand of water for its activities. Recent studies show that climate change will impact water availability in Brazilian watersheds and may affect the "geography of national production", which will also entail significant changes to land use. Thus, it is important to assess how factors that are external to the water system such as climate change and land use are going to affect water resources. This project's main goal is to assess the impacts of agriculture and of climate change on water resources, and generate knowledge and technical strategies for the efficient use of the soil and of water aimed at the conservation of water resources, sustainability, and competitiveness of agriculture in different Brazilian biomes . The main results from the establishment of the AgroHidro network are: development of a georeferenced database that will make several studies on water resources possible; development of a water resource monitoring network, aimed at the understanding of the interaction between agriculture and water resources; training and capacity-building of a group for hydrological modelling; evaluation of the availability of water resources in watersheds in different Brazilian biomes and of how it relates to land use; validation of a set of indicators of water quality and quantity; identification of technical-scientific issues related to agriculture and climate change and proposal of agrotechnologies to mitigate impacts on the water demand/supply ratio; definition of scenarios and analysis of the impact of climate change and of agriculture on the availability of water resources; organization of the information and knowledge generated by the AgroHidro network and other relevant national and international projects.

Status: Completed Start date: Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 GMT-03:00 2013 Conclusion date: Fri Jun 30 00:00:00 GMT-03:00 2017

Head Unit: Embrapa Cerrados

Project leader: Lineu Neiva Rodrigues

Contact: lineu.rodrigues@embrapa.br

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