TY - ENCYC

T1 - Irrigation Strategies for Sustainable Environmental and Influence on Human Health

AU - Liu, Fulai

PY - 2011

Y1 - 2011

N2 - A great challenge to the human society is to produce enough food to feed an ever-growing world population. Food production is highly dependent on extending irrigated agriculture, which, however, is limited due to an increasing water scarcity in many regions of the world. In addition, irrigation has led to serious impacts on both environmental and human health due to inappropriate water management practices. To overcome this challenge, there is an urgent need to reconcile water demands for maintaining environmental sustainability, enhancing human health, and increasing agricultural productivity. To achieve this, new techniques of wastewater treatment are required for safely reusing low-quality water resources in food production. Adoption of advanced irrigation technologies such as subsurface drip irrigation for high-value crops may significantly improve the hydrophonic crop productivity. Furthermore, novel environment-friendly water-saving irrigation strategies such as alternate partial root-zone drying (PRD) irrigation that may simultaneously increase water use efficiency (WUE) and reduce impacts on environment and human health should be optimized and extended at farm levels. It is anticipated that sustainable irrigation and water management could be achieved at farm and regional scales by developing decision support systems (DSS) that integrate crop growth model, irrigation scheduling model, and risk assessment models.

AB - A great challenge to the human society is to produce enough food to feed an ever-growing world population. Food production is highly dependent on extending irrigated agriculture, which, however, is limited due to an increasing water scarcity in many regions of the world. In addition, irrigation has led to serious impacts on both environmental and human health due to inappropriate water management practices. To overcome this challenge, there is an urgent need to reconcile water demands for maintaining environmental sustainability, enhancing human health, and increasing agricultural productivity. To achieve this, new techniques of wastewater treatment are required for safely reusing low-quality water resources in food production. Adoption of advanced irrigation technologies such as subsurface drip irrigation for high-value crops may significantly improve the hydrophonic crop productivity. Furthermore, novel environment-friendly water-saving irrigation strategies such as alternate partial root-zone drying (PRD) irrigation that may simultaneously increase water use efficiency (WUE) and reduce impacts on environment and human health should be optimized and extended at farm levels. It is anticipated that sustainable irrigation and water management could be achieved at farm and regional scales by developing decision support systems (DSS) that integrate crop growth model, irrigation scheduling model, and risk assessment models.

KW - Environmental sustainability

KW - Food security and safety

KW - Human health

KW - Impact

KW - Irrigation

KW - Modeling

KW - Partial root-zone drying

KW - Risk assessment

KW - Water scarcity

KW - Water use efficiency

U2 - 10.1016/B978-0-444-52272-6.00514-6

DO - 10.1016/B978-0-444-52272-6.00514-6

M3 - Encyclopedia chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85184540655

VL - 3

SP - 297

EP - 303

BT - Encyclopedia of Environmental Health

A2 - Nriagu, Jerome

PB - Elsevier

ER -