AWESOME Water and food demand (WATNEEDS crop model)

In this record, we provide the results in terms of crop water requirements, calculated by the hydrological model WATNEEDS, and crop harvested area under the implemented crop replacement scenarios, that have been developed to optimize water use, crop production and agricultural value in present and future climate scenarios in the Nile Basin. These scenarios were designed, modeled and generated for the deliverable D2.3 of AWESOME WP2: Dynamic and spatially distributed crop water use modeling.

The analyses have been conducted at the mesoscale, with a specific focus has been reserved for Egypt, as it is particularly relevant for the AWESOME project because the demo sites of the innovative technologies are being build there. In addition, we investigated present and future reallocation scenarios also for Ethiopia and Sudan, to cover the main cropland along the Nile River Basin.

A baseline scenario is evaluated to quantify blue and green crop water requirements for the current climate conditions and current crop distribution (averaged for the period 2011-2016). Future scenarios have been implemented using future climatic data for the average period around year 2050 (2048-2052) and year 2100 (2096-2100) under three different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs): RCP 4.5, RCP 2.6 and RCP 8.5.

This record contains:

- The Deliverable D2.3, where the optimization model and the calculation of the crop water requirements under different climatic scenarios are presented.

- The results for each implemented scenario, in terms of harvested area and irrigation water consumption (.tif files and excel files), for the Nile River Basin and at the national level for each focus country (Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt).

- Description of the data (excel file and pdf file)