Cuantificación de la huella hídrica del cultivo de arroz en dos zonas productoras de Perú. Arroz de riego en Perú competitivo e eficiente en el uso de agua mediante agricultura climáticamente inteligente

As the freshwater becomes a more essential and scarce resource, indicators have been arisen to measure water consumption. This has helped to warn about the use of this resource in different production sectors. Thus, several organizations have converged in a methodology for water footprint estimation. The water footprint is a sustainability indicator, which allows determining the agro-livestock impact on the environment. The impact assessment is carried out through the freshwater quantification used directly or indirectly in an agricultural production process. This study pretends to determine the water footprint for rice production in four different Peru's localities. The methodology was taken from the "The Water Footprint Assessment Manual", which sets the global standards for water consumption gauging. The study area is located in four Peruvian provinces, Utcumbamba, Chiclayo, Picota and Sullana. In all localities, two gauging stations were set up. These measured the total water used for rice irrigation during the whole crop cycle. At least one rice campaign was evaluated in each location. But, in places like Picota and Sullana suffered external inconveniences, which hampered the complete data capturing. For that reason, they only monitored the irrigation activities when the rice productive cycle was almost ending. Besides, weather and soil properties were also monitored. Weather data were taken through meteorological stations established in situ. The soil texture was measured at the field and then was used as input to obtain soil hydraulic characteristics. For this activity, the Soil Water Characteristics (SWC) software was implemented. From this initial phase, several findings were obtained, for example, in provinces such as Utcumbamba, it was able to assess the water consumption in irrigation that was 928.8 mm and 763.2 mm, for which almost 110 mm are irrigated before of planting. Likewise, farmers are used to employ high water quantities at the end of the cycle due to drought conditions. Finally, the project has just finished the gauging process, thus, it is expected that the water footprint can be assessed for these regions.