Accurate large-scale irrigation performance assessment with a poor dataset

Feltz, Nicolas [UCL] Vanclooster, Marnik [UCL]

Irrigated agriculture remains the largest consumer of global freshwater resources, and improving water management in irrigated agriculture is a key issue to solve the global water and food crisis. The design, planning and improvement of irrigation often rely on the assessment of irrigation performance (IP), using efficiency indicators. However, the use of the efficiency concepts can lead to misinterpretation and is frequently critized. Moreover, they only include technical, on-site and time-specific considerations, while socio-economic issues, management and scale effects are neglected. Large scale irrigation performances are then likely to differ from reference on-site efficiencies and specific methodologies needs to be implemented to evaluate them