AIDA: High-resolution detection of water demand in the Italian agricultural sector

Italy's agricultural sector, a cornerstone of its economy, has been facing mounting challenges from frequent droughts and water shortages, as the ones of 2022, 2023 and 2024, emphasizing the urgent need for effective and informed water management strategies. This study addresses this critical issue by evaluating water demand of rainfed and irrigated agriculture at high spatial resolution across Italy. This is done by integrating very high-resolution crop-specific datasets with irrigation intensity maps to develop a detailed land and crop cover map tracing 22 key crops at a 1 km resolution. This map then informs the WATNEEDS model, which solves the daily soil water balance in a crop-specific way to derive blue and green water demands. Validation of crop maps is performed against ground data by the Italian bureau of statistics (ISTAT), with satisfying results (86.7% of the model’s estimates present high correlation and low error w.r.t. ISTAT’s data). Irrigation volumes align well with regional statistics despite limitations in the validation sample. While uncertainties persist due to input data constraints and assumptions about hydrological processes and agricultural practices, the results offer significant opportunities to enhance water resource allocation. Among these, the findings of this study are supporting the identification of optimal locations for Small Agricultural Reservoirs (SmAR), a critical measure to mitigate the impacts of drought and ensure agricultural sustainability. This study was carried out within the CASTLE project and the RETURN Extended Partnership and received funding from the European Union Next-GenerationEU (National Recovery and Resilience Plan – NRRP, Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.1 – D.D. n. 104 02/02/2022 PRIN 2022 project code MUR 2022XSERL4 - CUP  B53D23007590006 and National Recovery and Resilience Plan –NRRP, Mission 4, Component
2, Investment 1.3 – D.D. 1243 2/8/2022, PE0000005)