Modeling Water Futures Using Food Security and Environmental Sustainability Approaches

Global water scarcity is becoming a constraint for human development. Therefore there is a need to enhance water productivity of the irrigated and rainfed agriculture to meet the increasing food demand due to the population growth. This paper describes modeling efforts to assess present and future water needs for food, people and environment. This exercise is being carried out by the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) in five countries, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, and Pakistan, which together cover 51% of irrigated area and 43% population in the world. This paper presents two modeling frameworks including the food security approach of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) through policy dialogue model (PODIUM), an environmental approach i.e. the Basin wide Holistic Integrated Water Assessment (BHIWA) model and its system dynamic version using VenSim environment.