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Restrictions during droughts

River basin authorities have improved the use of drought management plans, which dictate measures when precipitation is significantly below normal recorded levels. To ensure sufficient water flows reaches downstream ecosystems and water users, river basin authorities have set target minimum flows across river basins and established emergency controls where water users, including irrigated agriculture, undergo increasing restrictions on their water use as these target river flows and aquifer levels reach minimum thresholds.

In Europe, authorities typically consider agriculture as a non-priority use compared to drinking water services. Hence, agriculture often bear most of the restrictions on water abstraction during drought conditions and most of the reduction in allocations to meet sustainable abstraction limits. The agricultural sector faces major challenges to minimise economic losses, especially as Europe is facing more frequent and intense droughts in the future.

Drought forecasting and preparedness should alleviate the problem, while sophisticated mechanisms to optimise water allocations in agriculture during droughts, while meeting environmental flows, are being developed in several countries (Kampragou et al., 2011; Rey et al., 2017). This includes for example real-time monitoring of river flows and abstraction, as well as intra-annual water reallocation between users. Some countries such as Spain use water market mechanisms to reallocate water (Garrido et al., 2012).