Adaptation of Irrigated Agriculture to Climate Change: Transdisciplinary Modelling of a Watershed in South India.

In the context of climate change and of agriculture increasingly relying on groundwater irrigation, it is crucial to develop reliable methods for sustainability assessment of current and alternative agricultural systems. The awareness that water resource management must account for interactions and feedbacks between biophysical processes determining the movement of water and human behaviour in a given socio-economic context, has gained significant recognition among scientists in the past few years, including the recent advocacy for the development of the new science of “socio-hydrology”, dedicated to studying the “co-evolution of coupled human-water systems” (Sivapalan et al. 2011). Recently, “Change in hydrology and society” was proposed by IAHS as the main research theme for the decade 2013–2022 (Montanari et al. 2013). A wide variety of models have been developed for simulating future scenarios of land-use change, climate change or ex-ante evaluation of management policies. Such models usually fail to account for feed backs of shrinking water resources on farmer strategies, and tend to neglect the biophysical and socio-economic interactions occurring both spatially and temporally, within the watershed (Barthel et al. 2012). We introduce the Indo-French CEFIPRA project “AICHA” (Adaptation of Irrigated agriculture to climate CHAnge, 2013−2016) based on a watershed in South India where a longterm environmental observatory has been set-up. We describe the trans-disciplinary approach that is being developed to analyse the agro-hydrological and socio-economic drivers of groundwater sustainability and farmer adaptation, using integrated modelling.