The coastal zone of Bangladesh is the most vulnerable region of the eastern Ganges basin, occupies about 30% (46,000 km2) of the country’s land area and is home to some of the world’s poorest and most food insecure 39 million people, whose livelihoods depend primarily on agriculture and aquaculture. Key challenges to both agricultural and aquacultural productivity include excessive flooding during the rainy season, lack of access to fresh water and soil salinity during the dry season, and severe cyclonic storms and tidal surges throughout the year.

Agricultural water management (AWM) interventions, such as soil and water conservation or small-scale irrigation around small-scale water reservoirs, have repeatedly shown benefits to yields, soil fertility and water availability – at the field and experimental farm scale. It is assumed that these benefits will result in better and more sustainable livelihoods. However, there has been little published evidence of such wide-scale beneficial impacts.

Approximately half of the irrigated area of Iran falls under different types of salt-affected soils and average yield losses may be as high as 50 percent. Slightly and moderately salt-affected soils are mostly found on the piedmonts at the foot of the Elburz (Alborz) Mountains in the northern part of the country. The soils having severe to extreme salinity are predominantly located in the Central Plateau, the Khuzestan and Southern Coastal Plains and the Caspian Coastal Plain.

This guide presents a step-by-step approach in using a participatory mapping method with community members to identify and map ecosystem services and changes in their supply across multiuse agricultural landscapes. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government agencies and researchers can use this approach to learn from communities about how they use and access natural resources.

By determining the capacity of relevant international, national and regional legislation to support sustainable use of water and land, planners, legislative drafters and policymakers have a basis for recommending legal and institutional reform. This report, based on an investigation into existing water- and land- management laws and issues in three countries in the region, offers a methodology that can be used for such evaluations.