ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Drylands
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1535598
This article is part of the Research Topic Sociohydrology in Drylands View all 9 articles
A sociohydrological model for evaluating the drought resilience of indigenous and modern dryland irrigation systems in Sri Lanka
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering and School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan
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Over the millennia, indigenous small tanks (small reservoirs or ponds) have served to store rainwater and surface runoff to irrigate drylands. However, despite their significance, small tanks have been gradually abandoned in drylands over the past decades to expand cultivable areas under modern agricultural interventions, such as dam reservoirs and canal systems. Sole reliance on modern water interventions has intensified freshwater stress and rendered dryland agriculture vulnerable to droughts. Herein, we present a sociohydrological model incorporating the concept of human salience (i.e. attention accorded by farmers based on actual and perceived reservoir water availability and rainfall) to simulate farmer decisions on cultivation area. By applying the model to a centrally managed modern system and a quasi-decentralized indigenous system in the Mahaweli H irrigation scheme of the Sri Lankan dry zone for the 2010-2020 period, we calibrated farmer perception levels to show that indigenous system farmers perceive a significantly low rainfall threshold indicating greater adaptability to dry conditions. Sensitivity of perception levels to cultivation area demonstrate that modern system farmers have an 18% higher dependency on reservoir water availability compared to indigenous farmers when deciding cultivation area. This stark dependency on reservoir water availability of modern system farmers is rooted in lack of accessibility to small tanks, a feature that enhance drought resilience of farmers in the indigenous system. While providing quantifiable insights, this comparative assessment underscores the importance of critically evaluating the efficacy of decentralized indigenous small tanks in current water resource investments.
Keywords: sociohydrological model, indigenous irrigation system, Dryland, reservoir dependency, Farmers' perception, Small tanks
Received: 27 Nov 2024; Accepted: 04 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wickramasinghe and Nakamura. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Shinichiro Nakamura, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering and School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, 464-8603, Aichi, Japan
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