Water resources in Italy: Availability and agricultural uses

Information on quantity and quality of fresh water and is availability is essential for sustainable development, economic growth and social stability. The International Programme for Technology and Research in Irrigation and Drainage (IPTRID) and the Italian National Committee of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) combined their efforts to publish a document on water resources in Italy with special attention devoted to the state of agricultural water management. The aim of this paper is to give a quantitative overview on available water resources in the Italian countryside, taking into account the existing differences between the many Italian regions. The report focuses on renewable water resources, defined as that part of water resources generated from precipitation and computed on the basis of the water balance. Thank to the collaborations between ICID-Italy and the Central Office of Agro-Ecology (UCEA), for the period 1971-2000, we were able to analyse the annual values of rainfall and reference evapotranspiration related to 544 points of a grid which covers the whole country. The grid comes from a geostatistical computation, the so-called kriging interpolation, based on data observed at weather stations belonging to the SIAN network. Data processing, supported by GIS software, is aimed at the computation of the effective infiltration that gives us a reliable assessment of the amount of renewable water resources. On the one hand the results confirm the global amount of water resources previously computed in other projects, but on the other they highlight the differences between the many parts of our country and they point out that a good assessment of water resources needs an awareness and a knowledge of the differences in reality which are typical features of our country. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.