USDA Grant Supports Study of Groundwater’s Role as Farms Adapt to Climate Change

Crop losses due to extreme heat are projected to rise as the Earth experiences more years like 2023—the warmest ever recorded in nearly two centuries of weather monitoring. While irrigation is a key tool for agriculture to adapt to these rising temperatures, the role of groundwater remains underexplored, even as aquifers across the globe face rapid depletion.

Now, a $650,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture will support a University of Maryland researcher’s work to address these intertwined problems. Agriculture and resource economics Assistant Professor Louis Preonas will collaborate on the four-year award with scholars at the University of Chicago, Colorado State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

“Groundwater is a classic ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’ where many small users extract too much water because no individual user has the incentive to conserve,” he said. “This became a major resource management challenge long before climate change. Our project hopes to be the first to assess what climate change will mean for current and future groundwater scarcity.”

The project will focus on understanding the dynamics between extreme heat, irrigation behavior and groundwater depletion in the U.S. agricultural sector. Using a combination of high-resolution data and a statistical method known as econometrics, Preonas and his team aim to produce findings that will be relevant both to researchers studying climate change and natural resources and to policymakers tasked with overseeing agricultural water consumption as the world continues to heat up, and the demand for food grows along with populations.

Preonas and his collaborators will first estimate how farmers use groundwater irrigation to adapt to extreme heat by analyzing electricity consumption data from groundwater pumps.

The project will also predict the long-term dynamics of groundwater depletion under a range of future climate scenarios. These projections will capture two opposing effects, where hotter climates increase farmers’ demand for irrigation, resulting in an increased use of groundwater that depletes the resource, which then leads to higher outlays for groundwater pumping and more costly adaptive irrigation to keep farms running.

Third, the team will analyze the relationship between crop insurance policies and water use, investigating how federal insurance programs influence farmers’ irrigation decisions and groundwater consumption, and examining the hypothesis that offering greater insurance subsidies for water-intensive crops could inadvertently encourage depletion of groundwater.

By combining these analyses, the project aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of the role groundwater plays in agricultural climate adaptation and to identify sustainable management strategies for this critical resource, ensuring that groundwater can continue to support U.S. agriculture while reducing the risk of long-term depletion.