Washington, August 26 (ANI): The contribution of irrigation to global agricultural productivity is almost equivalent to the entire output of the U.S., indicating that it adds up to a sizeable impact on carbon uptake from the atmosphere according to a new study.
It also means that water shortages - already forecasted to be a big problem as the world warms - could contribute to yet more warming through a positive feedback loop.
The new research quantified irrigation's contribution to global agricultural productivity for the years 1998-2002, estimating the amount of carbon uptake enabled by relieving water stress on croplands.
"If you add up all the annual productivity that comes solely due to irrigation, it adds up to about 0.4 petagrams of carbon, nearly equivalent to the total agricultural productivity of the United States," says study author Mutlu Ozdogan, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of forest and wildlife ecology and member of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
The study was recently published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. (ANI)
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