Sustainability of Traditional Water Management Systems for Agriculture in Tunisia

Tunisia is a marginal country hydrologically and it has adopted a number of distinctive of traditional water management for agriculture. Tunisia contains three different climate zones: Mediterranean, semi-arid and arid, which experience differing water availability. Due largely to these differences in potential water resources, there exist a number of distinctive methods of water management for agriculture. The northern Mediterranean region is dominated by modern reservoir-fed irrigation. The central region supports modern dam irrigation whilst traditional rainwater harvesting and terraced wadi systems predominate towards the south.The various installation hydraulics through the history be the old man stopping in stone allot with Roman (it be the case in the oasis of Gabes) and the system of harvest of rainwater in Kairouan.In the south of Tunisia, the inhabitants built a fortress (ksar) on the most inaccessible site in the area, and used it to store the local population's food reserves. The fortress was protected by outlying posts and an early alarm system. At the same time, the town's residents developed water harvesting techniques (earthern dikes or jessour, and cisterns) for the mobilization and use of rainfall and runoff waters. These water harvesting systems are still in use today. The jessour, built in the intermountain runoff courses, capture water and silt and create terraces where fruit trees and annual crops are cultivated. The cisterns, locally known as majen or fasquia, are small to medium (1 to 50 m3) subsurface reservoirs where rainfall and runoff are stored for domestic uses, livestock watering and occasional supplemental irrigation.This paper describes these contrasting techniques and examines their environmental sustainability. Climate changes and their impact on water resources in Tunisia is reviewed. For a country like Tunisia, drought is probably the most feared phenomenon of the expected climatic change during the XXI century. Having suffered from four successive years of drought (1998-2001) and being aware of the risks associated with climate changes, Tunisia carried out a strategic study in 2007 with the support of GTZ to adapt the agricultural sector and ecosystems to climate changes. This involved forecasting Tunisia’s climate up to 2030 and 2050.

کلیدواژه ها:

Sustainability ، climate change ، rainwater harvesting ، dam irrigation ، Tunisia