In the context of climate change and of agriculture increasingly relying on groundwater irrigation, it is crucial to develop reliable methods for sustainability assessment of current and alternative agricultural systems. The awareness that water resource management must account for interactions and feedbacks between biophysical processes determining the movement of water and human behaviour in a given socio-economic context, has gained significant recognition among scientists in the past few years, including the recent advocacy for the development of the new science of "socio-hydrology", dedicated to studying the "co-evolution of coupled human-water systems" (Sivapalan et al. 2011). Recently, "Change in hydrology and society" was proposed by IAHS as the main research theme for the decade 2013-2022 (Montanari et al. 2013).
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