Mediterranean Farmers Face Water Crisis, Expert Warns

(MENAFN) Farmers across the Mediterranean must urgently shift toward water-efficient agricultural practices as climate change intensifies pressure on one of the world's most water-stressed regions, a leading irrigation expert has warned.

Guido D'Urso, a professor of agricultural hydraulics, irrigation, and remote sensing at the University of Naples Federico II, told media that preparing farmland in the Mediterranean basin for extreme weather is no longer optional — it is essential to shield both the land and farmers' livelihoods from potentially catastrophic losses.

With climate change driving up demand for water across the globe, D'Urso stressed that agriculture — the single largest consumer of water worldwide — must be at the center of any meaningful response. He emphasized that the technological tools required to monitor vulnerabilities and respond to climate-related disasters already exist and are ready to deploy.

A core problem, he said, is that debates around irrigation water tend to stay superficial. Standardized water accounting, he argued, is urgently needed to bring real transparency to how resources are distributed.

"Water accounting procedure should be standardized in such a way that in every place, we know exactly how much water is available, where this has to be used for civilian, industrial, agricultural use. So, this makes all the allocation policies much more transparent to everybody.

"This is quite easy to implement from the theoretical point of view, but in practice, this is facing a lot of problems because the water sector is ruled by different authorities. Inevitably, there are conflicts and availability of objective data. We have to take this into account in order to make the entire hydrological process more transparent and how we use water resources for a better management," he said.

Younger Generations Could Drive an Agricultural Tech Revolution
D'Urso identified growing climate awareness among younger generations as a critical and underutilized opportunity for transforming how agriculture manages water. Young farmers, he noted, are far more at ease with modern technologies than their predecessors — a generational advantage that should be harnessed now.

"All the steps we take in using water resources, primarily in agriculture, can now rely on new technologies. This generational shift is also taking place on farms. Let us make use of this change to obtain more data using the technologies available today and to move toward data-driven agriculture," he said.


Pointing to past policy — particularly in Türkiye — that leaned heavily on large, complex dam infrastructure, D'Urso said considerably more resilience against drought could be achieved through farm-level interventions and nature-based solutions.

"We need to provide incentive to the farmers to use more drip irrigation, subsurface irrigation, which avoid evaporation, and also using technologies based on remote control of these pipelines and in order to monitor continuously, try to open and manage more effectively the water which is being distributed to the field. So, all this combined are really representing huge steps in improving the water efficiency in irrigation," he said.

D'Urso also flagged a critical structural gap in the agricultural knowledge chain: innovations generated by researchers are not reaching the farmers who need them most. Bridging that divide, he said, requires purpose-built capacity-building frameworks and trained specialists capable of translating cutting-edge research into practical, farm-specific strategies.

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