scholarly journals Will We Soon Run Out of Water?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Ghislain de Marsily

In 2000, the World population was 6.2 billion; it reached 7 billion in 2012 and should reach 9.5 billion (±0.4) in 2050 and 11 billion (±1.5) in 2100, according to UN projections. The trend after 2100 is still one of global demographic growth, but after 2060, Africa would be the only continent where the population would still increase. The amount of water consumed annually to produce the food necessary to meet the needs varies greatly between countries, from about 600 to 2,500 m<sup>3</sup>/year per capita, depending on their wealth, their food habits (particularly meat consumption), and the percentage of food waste they generate. In 2000, the total food production was on the order of 3,300 million tons (in cereal equivalents). In 2019, about 0.8 billion inhabitants of the planet still suffer from hunger and do not get the nutrition they need to be in good health or, in the case of children, to grow properly (both physically and intellectually). Assuming a World average water consumption for food of 1,300 m<sup>3</sup>/year per capita in 2000, 1,400 m<sup>3</sup>/year in 2050, and 1,500 m<sup>3</sup>/year in 2100, a volume of water of around 8,200 km<sup>3</sup>/year was needed in 2000, 13,000 km<sup>3</sup>/year will be needed in 2050, and 16,500 km<sup>3</sup>/year in 2100. Will that much water be available on earth? Can there be conflicts related to a food deficit? Some preliminary answers and scenarios for food production will be given from a hydrologist viewpoint.

Author(s):  
Diana Bogueva ◽  
Kurt Schmidinger

In the West, meat is acceptable, tasty, delicious, palatable, and enjoyable. It has a well-established position in the consumers' food habits shaping the taste of the affluent eating culture and accepted as normal, natural, necessary, and nutritious. Although recent scientific evidence recognizes that meat has a high negative environmental impact, there is still lack of attention on the fact that we live on a planet with limited resources which need to be preserved. Part of this is a transition to more sustainable consumption habits and diets. This chapter examines the social readiness and acceptability of new meat alternatives as normal, natural, necessary, and nutritious amongst Gen Y and Gen Z consumers. It concludes that a reduction in meat consumption should be an essential part of creating a more sustainable diet in light of the projected increase of the world population, expected human health benefits, and improved environmental wellbeing of the planet.


Author(s):  
Karin Höijer ◽  
Caroline Lindö ◽  
Arwa Mustafa ◽  
Maria Nyberg ◽  
Viktoria Olsson ◽  
...  

The world is facing a number of challenges related to food consumption. These are, on the one hand, health effects and, on the other hand, the environmental impact of food production. Radical changes are needed to achieve a sustainable and healthy food production and consumption. Public and institutional meals play a vital role in promoting health and sustainability, since they are responsible for a significant part of food consumption, as well as their “normative influence” on peoples’ food habits. The aim of this paper is to provide an explorative review of the scientific literature, focusing on European research including both concepts of health and sustainability in studies of public meals. Of >3000 papers, 20 were found to satisfy these criteria and were thus included in the review. The results showed that schools and hospitals are the most dominant arenas where both health and sustainability have been addressed. Three different approaches in combining health and sustainability have been found, these are: “Health as embracing sustainability”, “Sustainability as embracing health” and “Health and sustainability as separate concepts”. However, a clear motivation for addressing both health and sustainability is most often missing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Allemang

As the world population continues to increase, world food production is not keeping up. This means that to continue to feed the world, we will need to optimize the production and utilization of food around the globe. Optimization of a process on a global scale requires massive data. Agriculture is no exception, but also brings its own unique issues, based on how wide spread agricultural data are, and the wide variety of data that is relevant to optimization of food production and supply. This suggests that we need a global data ecosystem for agriculture and nutrition. Such an ecosystem already exists to some extent, made up of data sets, metadata sets and even search engines that help to locate and utilize data sets. A key concept behind this is sustainability—how do we sustain our data sets, so that we can sustain our production and distribution of food? In order to make this vision a reality, we need to navigate the challenges for sustainable data management on a global scale. Starting from the current state of practice, how do we move forward to a practice in which we make use of global data to have an impact on world hunger? In particular, how do we find, collect and manage the data? How can this be effectively deployed to improve practice in the field? And how can we make sure that these practices are leading to the global goals of improving production, distribution and sustainability of the global food supply? These questions cannot be answered yet, but they are the focus of ongoing and future research to be published in this journal and elsewhere.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Gore

The world’s richest 1% are set to have per capita consumption emissions in 2030 that are still 30 times higher than the global per capita level compatible with the 1.5⁰C goal of the Paris Agreement, while the footprints of the poorest half of the world population are set to remain several times below that level. By 2030, the richest 1% are on course for an even greater share of total global emissions than when the Paris Agreement was signed. Tackling extreme inequality and targeting the excessive emissions linked to the consumption and investments of the world’s richest people is vital to keeping the 1.5⁰C Paris goal alive.


Author(s):  
Natan Mikhailovich Rutkin ◽  
Oleg Yurievich Lagutkin ◽  
Lina Yurievna Lagutkina

The outlook of the development of world urban agrotechnologies ("city-farming") by means of key innovation technological and market trends analysis has been researched. It is noted that the tendencies to reduction of the area of productive lands, exhausting ecosystem resources, including World ocean resources, harmful consequences of the climate changing are the main limiting factors of the development of traditional agriculture and supplying food products to the growing population of the world. The remote territories of mass food production from the mass markets result in a large amount of waste products (food losses) in supply chains, along with decreasing product quality and raising costs. Growth of the world population, increasing concentration of urban citizens along with changing of consumers’ food preferences towards "health", "natural", "organic" food bring up the development of an additional, or alternate, system of uninterrupted supply or self-provision of cities with food products, ensuring future food security. The article highlights the prospect of developing the international branch of agriculture in terms of its transition to the high-tech stage of development ("AgTech"), and reviews the innovation technologies inseparable from that transition. It has been found that the development of the urban agrotechnologies (city-farming), as a combination of innovative high-performance agro-practices of the food production in urban environment, can step up the level of food security due to increasing food availability in qualitative and quantitative aspects. The review of main city-farming technologies in accordance with directions of its practical applications was done for the first time. The conception "urban agrotechnologies" ("city-farming") has been defined as the scientific term.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 422-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahaf M. Ajaj ◽  
Suzan M. Shahin ◽  
Mohammed A. Salem

Climate change and global warming became a real concern for global food security. The world population explosion is a critical factor that results in enormous emissions of greenhouse gasses (GHGs), required to cover the growing demands of fresh water, food, and shelter. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a significant oil-producing country, which is included in the list of 55 countries that produce at least 55% of the world’s GHGs and thus involved in the top 30 countries over the world with emission deficits. At the same time, the UAE is located in an arid region of the world, with harsh environmental conditions. The sharp population increases and the massive growth in the urbanization are primary sources, lead to further stresses on the agricultural sector. Thus, the future of the food production industry in the country is a challenging situation. Consequently, the primary objective of this work is to shed light on the current concerns related to climate change and food security, through describing the implications of climate change on the food production sector of the UAE. Tailored solutions that can rescue the future of food security in the country are also highlighted.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
SANJOY BORTHAKUR ◽  
Manoj Kumar Singh ◽  
MRIDUSMITA BORTHAKUR

Food security is the foremost important issue of a state or a country. The development of a country or a state is highly dependent on it.Food unsecured population cannot think for other issues of their life. In the state of Assam, just after independence the state had enough food for the population, which gradually decreased until 1981-83. But, after 1981-83, the per capita availability of food grains had increased gradually due to use of modern practices of cultivation viz., high yielding varieties, fertilizers, etc. which led to increase in production. Nevertheless, this increase could not surpass the normative requirement of total food grains. Thus, although per capita availability of total cereals was marginally higher than the normative requirement, the state remains food deficit state since 1961-63 to 2000-02. Almost similar trend of change in per capita availability of food grains was observed in all the districts of the state with a few exceptions. Per capita availability of pulses as well as oilseeds was found to be very low, which was far below the normative requirement and in most of the cases revealed a declining trend.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Niels Dybro ◽  
Alan Christopher Hansen

Agribusinesses are investigating sustainable ways to meet the predicted increased demand for food production due to an increasing world population and higher living standards. Therefore, there is a strong need to increase agronomic output. This paper will review the current state of agricultural production of the main annual top-five staple grain crops grown around the world, their current yields and harvested area averages and trends. It concludes with a discussion of which changes are needed to increase the yield in lower yielding areas of the world. Finally, there is an assessment of what level of yield increases that could be attained provided the proposed changes are made and its predicted impact on food security by 2050.The current yield trends and trends for harvested area, when extrapolated out to 2050, indicate crop production will increase 106%. This includes an expansion of the total crop production area by 31%. This increase of cropping area can be achieved by increased utilization of available, uncropped land suitable for crop production, increased double cropping, and relay intercropping, allowing for multiple crops in a calendar year.In order to double crop production by 2050, it is necessary to focus on growing crops where the conditions make it possible, adopt the best sustainable crop production practices and implement them as intensively as possible everywhere, and consider improved crop production machine system options to reduce risk of soil compaction, which can reduce crop yields.With proposed changes across the world, it will be possible to exceed a doubling of food production by 2050 relative to 2005 levels, providing a reasonable high level of food security, absent wars and widespread natural disasters.


1998 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curt Forsberg

During a few decades, many fresh and marine water areas have been seriously affected by eutrophication, due to increasing discharges of phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) from modern society. The aim of this paper is to discuss the policies that are used and have been suggested to reduce eutrophication, and the factors counteracting these efforts. Policy options to reduce the fluxes of nutrients from point and non-point sources are summarized. A number of processes and mechanisms counteract the control measures taken so far, namely: the growing world population, the increasing urbanization, the intensive land independent animal production, the over-consumption of N and P, the emissions of N to the atmosphere, and the losses of P from P-enriched sediments. It is concluded that the driving force for eutrophication, the losses of nutrients from food production, organic waste, sewage, sludge and ashes can be expected to increase during the coming decades, as the world population continues to grow. Strong policies are needed to promote birth control, and to stop over-consumption of N (animal protein) and unnecessary intake of P (food additives). There is a number of barriers to overcome to reduce large-scale eutrophication, but also a lot of space for new policies and innovation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oludare Sunday Durodola ◽  
Joash Bwambale ◽  
Victo Nabunya

Abstract The world population is expected to increase with corresponding increase in food production and water withdrawals. To ensure continuous food production throughout the year, increasing irrigation is inevitable. However, the water available for agricultural use is inadequate due to the limited water resources globally and climate change challenges threatening water availability. The economy of Mbale, Uganda, mainly depends on rainfed agriculture. The rain season is from April to October whilst the dry season is from November to March. Therefore, this study examines the potential of rainwater harvesting for domestic and agricultural uses in Mbale. The AquaCrop model was adopted for the yield response of crops to water during the dry season. The study reveals that comparing the resulting rainwater harvesting potential with the water consumption, up to 186% of the annual water demand for domestic use, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) standard, can be provided. Thus, the excess harvested water from a 200 m2 rooftop was simulated for irrigation purposes, which shows that it can be used to cultivate areas of 269, 429, 125 and 388 m2 for cabbage, tomato, maize and potato respectively during dry periods. The economic analysis shows a benefit cost ratio of 1.99 over 10 years. It concludes by recommending RWH as an alternative water supply source for domestic and agricultural uses.


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