| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Encyclopedia of Environmental Health |
| Editors | Jerome Nriagu |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Publisher | Elsevier |
| Publication date | 1 Jan 2011 |
| Pages | 297-303 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2011 |
Abstract
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.
