Impacts of climate change on agricultural water management and its coping strategies

Climate change has led to an increase in globally average annual temperature, changes in regional precipitation patterns, changes in river characteristics, and frequently occurrence of extreme climatic events, and so on, showing its inevitable influence to agricultural water resources and agricultural production worldwide. The events above pose great challenge to the sustainable development of agriculture and modern agricultural water management in the world, especially in the arid and semi-arid regions. This paper introduced the occurrence of extreme weather events under climate change, mainly pointing out the adverse effects of drought and flooding on the global agricultural production, and evaluated the effects of climate change on the availability and quality of agricultural water resources and the water requirements for crops caused by climate change, which included the changing patterns of temperature and precipitation, as well as the frequency and extent of extreme weather events. The impacts of climate change on the surface water, groundwater, snow and glaciers, the causes for the changes of water quality, and the differences in crop water requirements across the globe were highlighted. Besides, the paper also explained the effects of climate change on farming and animal husbandry, mainly referring to the irrigation water, available cultivated land area, crop production, livestock water demands and herbage production, caused by water elements. And then reviewed the coping strategies to agriculture water management under the circumstance of climate change, including selection of coping strategies and performance evaluation of agricultural water management, analysis of adaptation-mitigation trade off, and climate risk management mechanism. Based on the research of climate change on agricultural water management and its coping strategies, the paper set forth to the following suggestions. Firstly, scale effect and uncertainties in the influence of climate change to agricultural water management need to be considered, thereby proper strategy and measure should be made and selected to suit the local conditions. Secondly, comprehensive evaluation method based on the integration of models need to be established actively, and thereby the accuracy and reliability of the comprehensive prediction and evaluation results should be improved profitably. Thirdly, analysis of adaptation-mitigation trade off and coordinate benefit of agricultural water management strategies need to be deeply strengthened, thereby the effect of the strategies should be promoted. Finally, the authors of paper suggested that domestic scholars should strengthen their research efforts to the comprehensive evaluation method and effect analysis, and pointed out that the appropriate selection and integration of various strategies with various factors, such as engineering, agronomy, management, policy and so on, was an important and reliable way to deal with the impact of global climate change.