Climate-Smart Irrigation: Multiple Perspectives for Better Decision-Making

Climate-smart irrigation (CSI) brings productivity and livelihoods together with adaptation, resilience and, where feasible, mitigation. Judging whether irrigation is climate-smart is complicated by the different purposes of irrigation decisions and the scales at which their consequences become visible. This focused integrative review distinguishes actors from the decision perspectives through which success is judged. It examines six non-hierarchical perspectives: user/livelihood, service/operational, resource stewardship/allocation, public-policy/societal, public/development investment, and commercial/market. Three decision situations illustrate their interactions. Improved irrigation efficiency may benefit farmers without increasing basin water availability; solar irrigation may reduce operational emissions while changing groundwater-use incentives; and scarcity allocation brings competing needs, rights and resource risks into the same decision. These situations demonstrate why success within one decision context does not necessarily establish climate-smart performance. The review examines the scale and boundaries of supporting evidence and distinguishes demonstrated outcomes from indirect evidence and enabling conditions. The six perspectives are not criteria every irrigation decision must satisfy. Their value lies in revealing when a decision depends on consequences, conditions or evidence outside the immediate decision position. CSI can be judged more clearly through what irrigation decisions achieve, for whom, under what conditions, at what scale and with what climate relevance.