Climate change is reshaping agricultural water risks through increasing hydrological variability, more frequent extremes, deteriorating water quality, and declining ecosystem resilience, said the OECD in its Anticipating and monitoring water risks for agriculture report.

“Given the diverse water risks and decision contexts, the sector requires a suite of tools tailored to different risks and temporal and spatial scales,” reads the abstract. 

Different users, including policymakers, insurers and farmers, require different information products. The report developed a decision-oriented framework that tracks down monitoring and assessment tools. 

Among these are flood monitoring systems, near-term forecasts for extreme weather events, drought monitoring systems, water quality monitoring systems, irrigation advisory tools, water consumption monitoring systems, seasonal weather forecasts, drought hazard maps, flood hazard maps, hydrological irrigation maps, impact assessment tools, crop monitoring, and digital twins. 

The publication argues that the effective adaptation strategy requires moving beyond reactive disaster management toward continuous anticipation, monitoring, and forward-looking risk assessment. 

“Effective policy responses require a holistic understanding of water risks that accounts for both blue water resources, such as rivers, lakes and aquifers, and green water resources, including soil moisture and land-sourced rainfall, while understanding the role of cross-border linkages,” reads the report.

Instead of treating droughts and floods as isolated hazards, the publication recognises multiple interacting categories of risk: excess water (flooding and waterlogging), water scarcity and drought, declining water quality, degradation of freshwater ecosystems, and destabilisation of the hydrological cycle. 

The OECD also underlined current challenges and knowledge gaps, including comparable hydrological, agronomic and socio-economic data, but also measures of freshwater ecosystem health, groundwater depletion and land-atmosphere interactions.

This decision-centred perspective recognises that the value of information depends not only on predictive accuracy but also on whether it informs decision makers at the right moment, before they take irreversible investments or commit to long-term planning. 

“Tools are most useful when applied at critical decision points where the costs of poor or irreversible choices are high. At the same time, tools can be costly to develop and operate”.

The OECD highlights opportunities for public authorities to provide a long-term perspective on water risks, and calls on governments to promote a more mature data environment, and set clear governance and co-ordination structures. It also called for knowledge and technology transfer to and within the agricultural sector.