Improving Water Use Efficiency In Southern
Alberta Irrigated Agriculture:
Choice Of Criterion
Author(s)
K. K. Klein, S. N. Kulshreshtha, M. K. Ali & R. Bewer
Abstract
Irrigation accounts for the largest consumption of water in many areas of the
world, including Alberta. As water supplies dwindle under the threat of climate
change, several environmental lobby groups have argued that less water should
be available for irrigation with the hope that more water would then be available
for environmental objectives. The agricultural industry may be able to counteract
these criticisms if its water use efficiency could be increased and substantiated.
This requires selection of an appropriate criterion to use for measuring
improvement in water use efficiency (WUE). In this study, two aspects of WUE
are examined: Technical and Economic. Estimation is based on data for two river
sub-basins where irrigation is practised in Alberta, using data over a five-year
period, 2004-2008. The Oldman river sub-basin covers a larger area, and the
amount of water diverted reflects it. Water use technical efficiency for this
sub-basin was also higher than that for the Bow river sub-basin. Similar results
were obtained for water use economic efficiency. On average, in the Oldman
river sub-basin, one dam3 (1000 cubic meters) of irrigation water generates 4.4
tonnes of production, as against only 2.7 tonnes for the Bow river sub-basin. In
terms of economic efficiency, water applied contributes on average, $171 per
dam3 for the Oldman versus only $115 for the Bow river sub-basin. Final
assessment of these measures suggests that the physical efficiency measures
suffer from the limitation of ignoring the human aspect of efficiency
improvement. Thus, improving the technical efficiency may not necessarily lead
to improvement in human well-being, which is one of the major objectives of
Keywords
water use efficiency, irrigation, Alberta, techical efficiency, economic efficiency
Related Book
Other papers in this volume
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