SMART TECHNIQUES FOR IMPROVING WATER USE UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF ARID AND SEMI-ARID ENVIRONMENTAL AREAS: A REVIEW

Climate change will have a negative impact on the elements of agricultural devel-opment, especially in developing countries. Water plays a role as one of the most im-portant elements of social and agricultural development, including food security, indus-trial development, housing, urbanization and all other aspects of human life activities. In light of this, water scarcity appears to be a real big problem for the global economy in the near future.Egypt is one of those countries that may be exposed to the effects of climate change. Due to the limited water resources in Egypt, agriculture sector is the main con-sumer of water in Egypt (85%). It is one of the imperatives that the agricultural policy must adopt in Egypt to work in all directions and by all means to rationalize the water use and raise the water use efficiency in all aspects of uses, especially agricultural. For these reasons, there is a possibility to reduce the amount of water used in agri-culture and to maximize the water use to achieve water security through integrated management, as well as developing irrigation systems and using modern and smart tech-niques and technologies in agriculture. Therefore, there are some methods and techniques that can be used to maximize and improve water use in the agricultural sector: 1) Development of surface irrigation using self-compensating gated pipe irrigation technique for improving water use and yield compared to traditional gated pipe. 2) Using surge flow to increase distribution efficiency and reduce deep percolation compared to continuous irrigation. 3) The use of on-farm real-time technologies for surface irrigation systems reduces irrigation labor and plays a role in improving water use. 4) Applying IoT technologies and smart irrigation as a good tool to control everything in agriculture and make the right decision at the right time, especially irrigation water management. 5) Using ground image processing to measure the percentage of green cover (PGC) in order to estimate crop water requirements. 6) Reuse of agricultural drainage water, subsurface irrigation as one of the effective techniques that can be used in irrigation water management.