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The report examines the relationships between agricultural policies in the North China Plain, the approaches to water management that evolved from them, the quantity of water that was actually used, and the consequent groundwater depletion beneath Luancheng County, Hebei Province, from 1949 to 2000. To systematically address these relationships, we use a comprehensive water-balance approach. Our results indicate that a single, longstanding policy-that of using groundwater to meet the crop-water requirements not supplied by precipitation-is responsible for the steady rate of groundwater decline.
The development of societies is shaped to a large extent by their resources base, notably water resources. Access to and control of water depend primarily on the available technology and engineering feats, such as river-diversion structures, canals, dams and dikes. As growing human pressure on water resources brings actual water use closer to potential ceilings, supply-augmentation options get scarcer, and societies, therefore, usually respond by adopting conservation measures and by reallocating water towards more beneficial uses.
Water use efficiency; groundwater irrigation; tubewells; sustainability; irrigated farming; households; farmers; irrigation systems; energy consumption; pumps; food security; water demend; electricity supplies.
The transmission of malaria in Sri Lanka is unstable; its incidence greatly fluctuates from year to year and exhibits important variations within a year. Identification of the underlying risk factors of malaria is important to target the limited resources for the most-effective control of the disease. This report presents the first results of a project on malaria risk mapping to investigate whether this tool could be utilized to forecast malaria epidemics. It documents the key malaria risk factors for the Uda Walawe region of Sri Lanka, where monthly malaria incidence data were available over a 10-year period. In the study, data on aggregate malaria-incidence rates, land-use and water-use patterns, socioeconomic features and malaria-control interventions were collected and analyzed in a geographical information system. Malaria cases were mapped at the smallest administrative level and relative risks for different variables were calculated employing multivariate analyses. The findings of the study call for malaria-control strategies that are readily adapted to different ecological and epidemiological settings.