Optimal allocation of agricultural water and land resources integrated with virtual water trade: A perspective on spatial virtual water coordination.

Agricultural production consumes the majority of global freshwater resources. The worsening water scarcity has imposed significant stress on agricultural production when regions seek food self-sufficiency. To seek optimal allocation of spatial agricultural water and land resources in each water function zone of the objective region, a multi-objective optimization model was developed to tackle the trade-offs between the water-saving objective and the economic benefit objective considering virtual water trade (VWT). The cultivated area of each crop in each water function zone was taken into account as the decision variable, while a set of strong constraints were used to restrict land resources and water availability. Then, a decomposition-simplex method aggregation algorithm (DSMA) was proposed to solve this nonlinear, bounding-constrained, and multi-objective optimization model. Based on the quantitative analysis of the spatial blue and green virtual water in each agricultural product, the proposed methodology was applied to a real-world, provincial-scale region in China (i.e., Jiangsu Province). The optimized results provided 18 Pareto solutions to reallocate the land resources in the 21 IV-level water function zones of Jiangsu Province, considering four major rainy-season crops and two dry-season crops. Compared to the actual scenario, the superior scheme increased by 7.95% (5.6 × 10

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.