New Water Policy and Practice Issue 4, Number 1, Fall 2017 | Page 65

New Water Policy & Practice Journal • Volume 4, Number 1 • Fall 2017
Water Use Efficiency for Irrigation
Introducing Helga Pereira:
H
elga Pereira—PhD student. Civil Engineer-
ing Research and Innovation for Sustainability
(CERIS) researcher
In January 2005, Helga graduated in agronom-
ic engineering, from Instituto Superior de Agronomia,
Lisboa, where she was a research fellow. In January
2016, she began her PhD in Engineering and Manage-
ment, with professor Rui Cunha Marques as her supervisor, at Instituto Superior
Técnico, Lisboa, Portugal, where she is carrying out her research study on agricul-
tural irrigation efficiency and adapted tariffs to agricultural water.
Introduction
O
ne of the biggest challenges that agriculture has to face in our days
is feeding all the World’s population. Climate changes that have oc-
curred, and which tend to be worsening, greatly affect agricultural
production that is increasingly dependent on water availability. The floods
that inundate land, displacing people and destroying homes and crops com-
pletely, contrasting with extreme drought where water is so essential to life,
and the gradual increase in global temperature, require extreme measures
throughout the world.
The year 2017 has been a devastating one for Portugal. Fires outside
the summer season have claimed more than a hundred lives and over 400,000
hectares of forest land. This is a reality of what climate change is causing. Ac-
cording to the Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera (IPMA) Septem-
ber report, “September 2017 was the driest of the last 87 years in mainland
Portugal, (...) being classified as extremely dry. (...). According to the dry
weather index PDSI1, on September 30, about 81.0% of the territory was in
severe drought and 7.4% in extreme drought.” IPMA October report states:
“This was the warmest month of October in the last 87 years (since 1931),
with the average value of the average air temperature about 3°C above the
normal value. (...) According to PDSI, at the end of October, the entire con-
tinental Portugal territory is in severe drought (24.8%) and extreme drought
conditions (75.2%).”
1
PDSI— Palmer Drought Severity Index.
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doi: 10.18278/nwpp.4.1.7