With its 55.5 billion cubic meters of annual water allocation, Egypt's Nile River accounts for 98% of all available freshwater - 85% of which is captured by farmers to irrigate their crops. But a combination of population growth and worsening climate change conditions means that farmers' water needs exceed what the river can supply. 

ICARDA's Soil, Water, and Agronomy (SWA) team of researchers supports farmers to transition, technically but also behaviorally, from farming conditions where water is no longer abundant – but increasingly scarce and precious.  

Alongside our partners, ICARDA is working to enhance water productivity and higher 'crop-per-drop' efficiency by streamlining and improving irrigation methods, water systems, and technology. 

• Rural Technology! 

Precision agriculture is yet to be widely developed in the Global South. But ICARDA is already leveraging advanced digital and geospatial tools, big data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in its innovative water management approaches in Egypt and across the region. 

Together with Egypt's Agriculture Research Center (ARC), ICARDA investigates the benefits of thermal imaging technology, which detects water stress in wheat, faba bean, and barley crops. Thermal imaging is highly reliable and helps with irrigation water scheduling – significantly reducing non-beneficial water depletions in newly reclaimed lands. 

To assess a farm's Water-Energy-Food (WEF) performance,  SWA has developed the Farm WEF Nexus Index to evaluate the quality of a farm's integrated resources management rather than the performance of each resource separately. This Index helps compare and rank farms based on their irrigation systems, agronomic practices, and energy efficiency. This indicator bases itself on four pillars: water, energy, crop yield, and CO2 emissions.