Groundwater comprises 97 percent of the
worlds readily accessible freshwater and provides the rural,
urban, industrial and irrigation water supply needs of 2
billion people around the world. As the more easily accessed
surface water resources are already being used, pressure on
groundwater is growing. In the last few decades, this
pressure has been evident through rapidly increasing pumping
of groundwater, accelerated by the availability of cheap

According to estimates by the International Land Coalition based at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), 57 million hectares of land have been leased to foreign investors since 2007. Current research has focused on human rights issues related to inward investment in land but has been ignorant of water resource issues and the challenges of managing scarce water. This handbook will be the first to address inward investment in land and its impact on water resources in Africa.

To ensure sustainable and optimal use of
its common property natural resources, Mexico will need to
strengthen its focus on enhancing stewardship in three key
sectors-forests, water, and energy resources. The key
objectives include the following: 1) identifying options
that would contribute to Mexico's climate agenda and
build social resilience through forest management; 2)
ensuring economically efficient and environmentally and

International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

This paper proposes a novel mechanism for reallocating temporary water flows or permanent water rights. The All-in-Auction (AiA) increases efficiency and social welfare by reallocating water without harming water rights holders. AiAs can be used to allocate variable or diminished flows among traditional or new uses. AiAs are appropriate for use within larger organizations that distribute water among members, e.g., irrigation districts or wholesale water agencies.

Politics is about access and power, and access to freshwater resources in rural China is complicated and understudied. China's massive size and diverse climate make it hard to generalize about freshwater resources in rural areas of the country. On balance, China is not water-scarce, yet geographic and temporal variations in water availability are dramatic, with China's driest areas receiving far less precipitation than the wettest areas. Rural areas are the locus of competition among freshwater users including agriculture, power companies, industry, households and ecosystems.

The Arizona Water Settlements Act of 2004 ended nearly four decades of water disputes between the Gila River Indian Community and the state of Arizona. This paper explores the historical background of the Gila River Indian Community and its claim to water rights, the evolution of tribal water rights laws that culminated in the historic settlement, and the consequences of the act on water resource management in the region. It also links the findings from this case to the broader field of indigenous water rights studies from other regions of the world.

Water rights markets in the western United States have expanded over the last 40 years, as a result of population growth in the West and Southwest, and limited development of new storage. Until 2008, house prices, home construction and population growth appeared to be locked in an ever-increasing upward trend. With little historical experience to the contrary, water right market prices similarly appeared to be driven by real estate development.

Water is critical to protecting wetlands in arid regions, especially in agriculture-dominated watersheds. This comparative case study analyzes three federal wildlife refuges in the Bear River Basin of the U.S. West where refuge managers secured water supplies by adapting to their local environmental context and their refuge's relationship to agriculture in being either irrigation-dependent, reservoir-adjacent or diked-delta wetlands.

Irrigation efficiency is a critical factor in irrigation water management. Irrigation efficiency is used in economic analysis when selecting an irrigation system design, and in irrigation management. It is also used in water rights adjudication and administration. On-farm irrigation efficiency is spatially and temporally variable and measuring irrigation efficiency is time consuming and costly. This paper describes a process to evaluate on-farm irrigation efficiency across the watershed using a combination of remote sensing and ground level measurements.

We present a model of economic growth of an agricultural household that is faced with an exogenous water availability constraint. We examine the long‐run investment and consumption choices under two scenarios: (i) when the water availability constraint is binding and (ii) when it is not binding. We then compare the two scenarios to derive conditional convergence hypotheses regarding the impact of water availability on long‐run agricultural growth. Panel data from Wyoming are used to test these conditional convergence hypotheses.

The Snowmelt Runoff Model (SRM) was used to simulate timing and magnitude of runoff for six climate scenarios (2030 and 2080 ‘Wet’, ‘Middle’, and ‘Dry’). The water supply results from SRM were run through a Southern Idaho reservoir operation and water rights allocation model (MODSIM). The 2030-Dry and 2080-Dry scenarios produce supply deficits relative to the current climate of 5.4%, and 1.9%, respectively, for which the corresponding irrigation water delivery reductions were 1.7% and 2.7%.