Projects per year
Abstract
The expansion of irrigated croplands throughout the 20th century boosted global agricultural productivity, yet limited improvement occurred in sub-Saharan Africa where many irrigation schemes and policies under-delivered. We mapped the distribution of croplands under active irrigation between 1986 and 2020 for one of Africa's largest and most important transboundary river basins – the Senegal River Valley (SRV); using Landsat imagery with a Random Forest classifier and Hidden Markov Model. We document two distinct epochs of irrigation development. Initially, a period of stagnation where less than 900 ha per year was added, lasting until 2008. Followed by a boom phase of rapidly expanding intensively irrigated production with ∼ 9,000 ha per year added for the last 12 years. These epochs overlap with national agricultural policy frameworks: the 1980s laissez-faire policies limited state involvement in agriculture and promoted Asian imports; followed by a more interventionist period focused on promoting domestic production following the food price crisis of 2008.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Environmental Research Letters |
Early online date | 9 Dec 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 9 Dec 2022 |
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- 1 Finished
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GCRF: DAMS 2.0: Design and assessment of resilient and sustainable interventions in water-energy-food-environment Mega-Systems
Hulme, D., Anderson, K., Bottacin Busolin, A., Dimova, R., Foster, T., Harou, J., Imai, K., Larkin, A., Lavers, T., Mancarella, P., Mutale, J., Panteli, M., Sen, K. & Whittington, D.
1/10/17 → 31/12/21
Project: Research