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First introduced by Allan (1997, 1999), the concept of “virtual water” refers to the volume of water used to produce a commodity, good or service. This term can be defined from two distinct perspectives. From the production-site standpoint, the virtual-water content of a product is the volume of freshwater used to produce a product measured at the place where it is produced (Hoekstra and Chapagain...
The purpose of this chapter is to report the footprint evaluations obtained at the national, regional and river basin levels for 1997–2006. The procedures and data sources used to generate the results were presented in Chaps. 3 and 4. A similar though slightly different approach was used in the case of the Guadiana river basin, which can be found in Aldaya and Llamas (2008a, b, 2009). This chapter...
This work presents new evidence that helps to question existing paradigms and tenets related to water policy and management in Spain. Historically, the management of water resources has focused on the supply side, securing water access through an engineering approach that has been, in most cases, a costly endeavour from economic and environmental perspectives. These technical solutions have been based...
This chapter attempts to bring the evaluations reported in Chaps. 5 and 6 to the policy context, by looking at economic performance, variations and causal relationships associated with agricultural and water policies. We start by reviewing changes in land productivity, both rainfed and irrigated, from a temporal and spatial perspective. Since agricultural policies are markedly different across Spanish...
The purpose of this chapter is to describe the methodologies applied in this study and to discuss other methods that are also applied in virtual-water studies. Within the virtual-water literature, the general approach is based on calculations of the virtual-water content of products in order to estimate the water footprint (WF) of a sector or economy. However, the examples found in the literature...
In most arid and semi-arid countries, water resource management is an issue that is both important and controversial. Most water resources experts now acknowledge that water conflicts are not caused by physical scarcity but are mainly due to poor water management (Rosegrant et al. 2002; Benoit and Comeau 2005; Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture 2007; Garrido and Dinar 2010,...
Global trade establishes an “invisible” and indirect link between water demand and water consumption sites. The literature on virtual-water “trade” has emphasised the options available to arid and semiarid countries to use international trade to deal with water resources scarcity (Allan 2003; Yang and Zehnder 2005; Chapagain et al. 2006a; Ma et al. 2006; Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management...
The evaluation of the water footprint and virtual water trade has become a promising means to evaluate the sustainability of a country’s water resources. This book is based on the research and results of a thorough study carried out for Spain, which serves as a leading case for a semi-arid country. The objective of this study was to assess and analyze Spain’s virtual water use and water footprint,...
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