Land and Water Resources

Agricultural production is dependent upon the availability of land and water resources; however, global and regional trends are changing the way in which land and water resources are available. Competing demand for resources on the urban-rural fringe are increasing the pressure on land and water systems near urban areas.

As urban areas expand in population, so too does their land area. The need to house and support urban residents often results in the expansion of the city and the creation of suburbs in the areas surrounding the city centre. In many parts of the world, and particularly in Canada and the United States, the regions surrounding cities contain some of most agriculturally productive soils in the country. However, encroaching urban expansion can result the loss of this prime agricultural land through development, prohibitively high land costs, and parcelization.

Scarcity of water resources is also becoming increasingly prevalent and concerning on a global level. Climate change is perturbing long-standing patterns in precipitation and temperature regimes, resulting in serious alterations to the availability, quality, and accessibility of water resources around the globe. Extreme weather events are becoming more common, causing some areas to experience wetter than normal conditions, while other areas are experiencing prolonged drought. Water scarcity, once limited to naturally water-poor countries such as Israel or Saudi Arabia, is becoming more widespread – as is the demand for methods to increase the efficiency of water use.

Water is a complex and interconnected flow resource that serves many users and functions and requires special management. No one water resource exists in isolation; rather, it exists as a system. Within this system, water flows between various bodies such as precipitation, rivers, lakes, and groundwater; serves a variety of human and environmental purposes; and changes in quality, quantity and accessibility as it flows from upstream sources to downstream ones. When water resources become scarce, this interconnected nature becomes more apparent – the overuse of one water resource can cause negative impacts on the other water resources within the system. As a result, water management plans that use a systems-view rather than a focus on individual resources, can help to make water systems more efficient, equitable, and functional for all users.

Therefore, resource management and agricultural plans will need to adopt a systems-scale focus in order to integrate geographically-fixed parcels of agricultural land with streams of available water resources, and thus increase agricultural productivity in peri-urban regions.

 

Continue to the next section to read about the unique characteristics of peri-urban agriculture.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *