Increasing the Benefits and Sustainability of Irrigation Through Integration of Fisheries: a guide for water planners, managers and engineers

This guide focuses on how to sustainably optimise the benefits of irrigation development, emphasizing the opportunities that fisheries can provide to increase food production and economic returns, enhance livelihoods and public health outcomes, and maintain key ecosystem services. The guide considers possible trade-offs between irrigation and fisheries, and provides recommendations on how these can be minimised. There is increasing recognition of the need for change across the full spectrum of agricultural practices to ensure that food production systems are more diverse, sustainable and resilient. In this context, the objectives of irrigation need to become more ambitious, shifting away from simply maximizing crop yields to maximizing net benefits across a range of uses of irrigation water, including ecosystems and nature-based solutions. One important way to achieve this is by better integrating fisheries into the planning, design, construction, operation and management of irrigation systems. The report concludes that better integration of fisheries and irrigation systems requires institutions to (i) help manage the schemes as multiple-use systems, and (ii) ensure that benefits from integration are socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable