Pakistan has only 30 days of water reserves - researchers

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Inadequate planning is exposing Pakistan to water-related threats from climate change and putting the country’s agriculture, industry and hydropower at risk, water experts say.

Speaking at a water summit in Pakistan recently, they said the country desperately needs more reservoirs to increase its water storage capacity, and they called for conservation awareness campaigns, the introduction of drought-tolerant crop varieties and more economical irrigation.

“The country is gravely vulnerable to water-related (effects) of the changing weather patterns,” said Pakistan’s minister for planning, development and reform, Ahsan Iqbal, in a keynote address at the summit in the nation’s capital.

In December, the World Resources Institute ranked Pakistan among the 36 most water-stressed countries in the world.

Iqbal said that Pakistan needs a minimum storage capacity of 40 percent of the around 115 million acre-feet of water available in the Indus river system throughout the year. But the country’s storage capacity is only 7 percent and is decreasing due to sediment build-up in reservoirs.

This gives Pakistan a stored water supply, adequate to meet its needs, of just 30 days. By contrast, “carryover capacity” in other countries ranges from 200 days in India to 1,000 days in Egypt, he said.

“In Pakistan, planners and policy makers across different sectors, including agriculture and industry, energy and health now have ... a daunting challenge before them of increasing the country’s water storage capacity,” Iqbal said.

The minister urged the finance ministry to explore funding avenues for new water storage projects to boost storage capacity. Many of these are hydroelectric dams, which would also produce power.

THREATS TO HYDROPOWER, AGRICULTURE

But Pakistan Water Partnership’s country director, Pervaiz Amir, warned that if climate change leads to lower water flows in the northwest of the country, it would cut the amount of hydroelectricity that can be produced.

More variable rainfall and glacier melt in the face of climate change also means that agriculture, which he said accounts for over 96 percent of the country’s water consumption, will be affected, Amir said.

Without more facilities to divert and store water, heavy rainfall and flooding in some parts of the country will continue to damage crops, increase soil erosion and delay planting and harvesting, he said.

Pakistan ranks ninth among countries most affected by floods, according to UN-Water’s World Water Development Report.

Arun Shrestha, a senior climate change specialist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), said that many South Asian countries lack preparedness for water-related hazards, including flood, droughts and glacial lake outburst floods, and instead focus mainly on post-disaster relief.

What is “more appalling,” he said, is that climate change is dealt with as a separate problem rather than integrated into planning for water-related areas of the government and economy including agriculture, industry, health and energy.

Shrestha urged South Asian countries to include disasters attributable to climate change in their respective water-related planning and policies.

He called for them to analyse their vulnerabilities to increasingly frequent flooding, droughts and glacial lake outburst floods, and to share the findings with each other to develop a regional action plan for dealing with climate-related disasters.

Shrestha underlined the need for regional coordination between government agencies so that river basins can be managed more efficiently, for example by sharing data about river flows.

Stephen Davies, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said that water, food and energy are closely interconnected, yet energy models do not properly address water constraints in South Asia and other regions.

Industrial growth and accelerating urbanisation are creating greater demand for energy, he said, but efforts to expand hydropower generation are being hampered by the shrinking availability of water.

Limitations on water availability also are impacting food production to meet the country’s galloping population growth, he added.

Chief executive of LEAD Pakistan and climate policy expert Tauqeer Ali Sheikh urged policymakers to incorporate the interdependence of water, food and energy into their planning.

In South Asia, “energy planning is often made without taking into account possible changes in water availability due to climate change or other water competing uses,” he pointed out. More

Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio are climate change and development reporters based in Islamabad, Pakistan.

 

© 2014

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity

World agriculture is now facing challenges unlike any before. Producing enough grain to make it to the next harvest has challenged farmers ever since agriculture began, but now the challenge is deepening as new trends—falling water tables, plateauing grain yields, and rising temperatures—join soil erosion to make it difficult to expand production fast enough.

As a result, world grain carryover stocks have dropped from an average of 107 days of consumption a decade or so ago to 74 days in recent years.

World food prices have more than doubled over the last decade. Those who live in the United States, where 9 percent of income goes for food, are largely insulated from these price shifts. But how do those who live on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder cope? They were already spending 50–70 percent of their income on food. Many were down to one meal a day before the price rises. Now millions of families routinely schedule one or more days each week when they will not eat at all.

What happens with the next price surge? Belt tightening has worked for some of the poorest people so far, but this cannot go much further. Spreading food unrest will likely lead to political instability. We could see a breakdown of political systems. Some governments may fall.

As food supplies have tightened, a new geopolitics of food has emerged—a world in which the global competition for land and water is intensifying and each country is fending for itself. We cannot claim that we are unaware of the trends that are undermining our food supply and thus our civilization. We know what we need to do.

There was a time when if we got into trouble on the food front, ministries of agriculture would offer farmers more financial incentives, like higher price supports, and things would soon return to normal. But responding to the tightening of food supplies today is a far more complex undertaking. It involves the ministries of energy, water resources, transportation, and health and family planning, among others. Because of the looming specter of climate change that is threatening to disrupt agriculture, we may find that energy policies will have an even greater effect on future food security than agricultural policies do. In short, avoiding a breakdown in the food system requires the mobilization of our entire society.

On the demand side of the food equation, there are four pressing needs—to stabilize world population, eradicate poverty, reduce excessive meat consumption, and reverse biofuels policies that encourage the use of food, land, or water that could otherwise be used to feed people. We need to press forward on all four fronts at the same time.

The first two goals are closely related. Indeed, stabilizing population depends on eliminating poverty. Even a cursory look at population growth rates shows that the countries where population size has stabilized are virtually all high-income countries. On the other side of the coin, nearly all countries with high population growth rates are on the low end of the global economic ladder.

The world needs to focus on filling the gap in reproductive health care and family planning while working to eradicate poverty. Progress on one will reinforce progress on the other. Two cornerstones of eradicating poverty are making sure that all children—both boys and girls—get at least an elementary school education and rudimentary health care. And the poorest countries need a school lunch program, one that will encourage families to send children to school and that will enable them to learn once they get there.

Shifting to smaller families has many benefits. For one, there will be fewer people at the dinner table. It comes as no surprise that a disproportionate share of malnutrition is found in larger families.

At the other end of the food spectrum, a large segment of the world’s people are consuming animal products at a level that is unhealthy and contributing to obesity and cardiovascular disease. The good news is that when the affluent consume less meat, milk, and eggs, it improves their health. When meat consumption falls in the United States, as it recently has, this frees up grain for direct consumption. Moving down the food chain also lessens pressure on the earth’s land and water resources. In short, it is a win-win-win situation.

Another initiative, one that can quickly lower food prices, is the cancellation of biofuel mandates. There is no social justification for the massive conversion of food into fuel for cars. With plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars coming to market that can run on local wind-generated electricity at a gasoline-equivalent cost of 80¢ per gallon, why keep burning costly fuel at four times the price?

On the supply side of the food equation, we face several challenges, including stabilizing climate, raising water productivity, and conserving soil. Stabilizing climate is not easy, but it can be done if we act quickly. It will take a huge cut in carbon emissions, some 80 percent within a decade, to give us a chance of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. This means a wholesale restructuring of the world energy economy.

The easiest way to do this is to restructure the tax system. The market has many strengths, but it also has some dangerous weaknesses. It readily captures the direct costs of mining coal and delivering it to power plants. But the market does not incorporate the indirect costs of fossil fuels in prices, such as the costs to society of global warming. Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, noted when releasing his landmark study on the costs of climate change that climate change was the product of a massive market failure.

The goal of restructuring taxes is to lower income taxes and raise carbon taxes so that the cost of climate change and other indirect costs of fossil fuel use are incorporated in market prices. If we can get the market to tell the truth, the transition from coal and oil to wind, solar, and geothermal energy will move very fast. If we remove the massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, we will move even faster. 10

Although to some people this energy transition may seem farfetched, it is moving ahead, and at an exciting pace in some countries. For example, four states in northern Germany now get at least 46 percent of their electricity from wind. For Denmark, the figure is 26 percent. In the United States, both Iowa and South Dakota now get one fifth of their electricity from wind farms. Solar power in Europe can now satisfy the electricity needs of some 15 million households. Kenya now gets one fifth of its electricity from geothermal energy. And Indonesia is shooting for 9,500 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity by 2025, which would meet 56 percent of current electricity needs. More

 

© 2014

Cary Fowler on Food Security - TED Talk

Cary Fowler served as the Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust from 2005 to 2012.^[8] The trust's mandate is to ensure "the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide." Fowler was influential in the creation of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which currently houses samples of more than 783,000 distinct crop varieties. He stepped down as Executive Director of the trust in late 2012 but continues to serve in an advisory role and chairs the International Advisory Council of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.^[4][8]

Working with partner genebanks in 71 countries during Fowler's tenure as Executive Director, the Trust helped rescue 83,393 unique crop varieties from extinction. It sponsored more than 40 projects to screen crop collections for important traits such as heat and drought tolerance. In partnership with the USDA, a state-of-the-art genebank management system ("GRIN-Global") was developed and made available to 38 genebanks internationally, and the first ever global portal to accession (sample) level information (Genesys)^[9] was launched. The Trust's endowment grew more than $100 million to $134 million, and total funds raised surpassed $200 million.^[10][11]

By the end of Fowler's tenure, the Trust concluded three major agreements intended to protect and conserve crop diversity: with the Millennium Seed Bank of Kew Gardens,^[12] the indigenous communities in the Andes,^[13] and the international genebanks of the Consultive Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).^[14]

One example given here is for South Asia where we must pay attention from a food security perspective. Editor

© 2014

‘China a concern for South and Central Asia’s water security’

New Delhi: With China building a “cascade of dams” in the upper reaches of rivers that flow into Central and South Asia and drawing large amounts of water to sustain its economy and people, there is a need to engage the Asian giant at bilateral and multilateral fora on the issue of water that is fast becoming a scarce and contentious commodity, said diplomats and experts here.

Himalayas - Source of S. Asia's water

Addressing a round table on “Regional Water Security and Riverine Disputes: Issues Common to Central and South Asia” here Thursday, speakers, including ambassadors from Central Asian countries and other domain experts, also said that there is a need for Track II dialogue between civil society activists of countries and for transparency in sharing of hydro information in order to resolve the issues concerning sharing of water.

Leading strategic expert Brahma Chellaney said Central and South Asia share common water security issues. He said China is “happily placed” as it is home to the largest number of trans-border rivers, which all originate from the Tibetan Plateau and the Xinjiang region. Chellaney said China’s “annexation” of Tibetan Plateau and Xinjiang “changed the water discourse” for the people of South and Central Asia.

Chellaney, who is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, said China “is an issue of concern in South Asia and Central Asia… China is building a cascade of dams just before the rivers flow out of its territory.”

Ajay Bisaria, joint secretary in the Eurasia division of the external affairs ministry, said that India stands to benefit from the Central Asia South Asia Electricity Transmission and Trade Project, better known as CASA-1000, a new electricity transmission system to connect the countries of hydropower producing countries of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Ashok Sajjanhar, former ambassador to Kazakhstan, said the Aral Sea from being a lake of plenty with fish, birds and wildlife, has turned into an “ecological disaster” with very high salinity and water level shrunk massively. The Aral Sea is a lake lying between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Sajjanhar said the issue of water distribution and water management between countries sharing water bodies is very crucial.

Rajiv Dogra, former ambassador, said the Central Asian water bodies were once clear blue and pristine, but have shrunk due to overuse.

“A drop of water is a grain of gold”, is the value placed on water in Turkmenistan, said the country’s Ambassador Parakhat Hommadovich Durdyev at the seminar held at the India International Centre and organised by the think tank Society for Policy Studies in collaboration with Asia News Agency.

William Young, Lead Resource, South Asian Water Initiative, World Bank, said the Ganga plains is inhabited by 600 million people, which shows the dependency on the river. He said the World Bank was looking to establish dialogues for the Ganga and Brahmaputra basin river countries.

Sanjoy Hazarika, director of Centre for North East Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, said the run of river dams that China was building on the Brahmaputra removes the fertile silt from the river water when it is released downstream into India, thereby harming agriculture and leading to climate change.

Hazarika also slammed the idea of interlinking of rivers being proposed in India, terming it a disastrous idea. More

 

©

The Water Levels Of The Middle East’s Biggest Lake Have Dropped 95 Percent In Two Decades

According to the local environmental office in Iran, only five percent of the water remains in the biggest lake in the Middle East.

Lake Urmia sits in the far northwest corner of Iran, and was once the sixth largest saltwater lake in the world — slightly bigger than Utah’s Great Salt Lake. It’s relatively shallow, so the water drop has exposed huge tracts of land. Hamid Ranaghadr, an Iranian environmental official, told the New York Times that areas of the lake that were once under 30 feet of water are now dry and dusty lake beds. “We just emptied it out,” he said.

Being saltwater, Lake Urmia was never fit for drinking water or agriculture. But its collapse is indicative of the way climate change and poor water management has driven Iran into a potentially catastrophic water shortage. Dam construction recently increased throughout the country, both to provide badly needed electricity and water supplies for irrigation. But that’s also diverted massive amounts of the freshwater that formerly flowed into Lake Urmia. Other major rivers throughout the country have gone dry, and the dust from the riverbeds and the salt from Lake Urmia’s dried basin are now a form of pollution unto themselves. (Four of the world’s ten most polluted cities can be found in Iran.) Major cities around the country — including the capital of Tehran, home to 22 million — are making contingency plans for rationing. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani recently named water as a national security issue, and demonstrations and riots over water supplies have already erupted.

The collapse began in the mid-1990s. One local villager told the Times that he noticed the shoreline receding two decades ago, and now it’s no longer visible from his community. According to a 2012 study by the United Nations, 65 percent of the decline can be chalked up to climate change and the diversion of surface water cutting inflow to the lake. Another 25 percent was due to dams, and 10 percent was due to decreased rainfall over the lake itself.

A long drought in Iran ended two years ago, but the recent boost to rainfall has not been able to offset the other effects on the lake. Average temperatures around Lake Urmia rose three degrees in just the past ten years. In Pakistan, which sits along Iran’s southeast border, has seen its snowmelt and river flow reduced by climate change. That’s led to both political strife domestically, and to a strained relationship with India, which is building dams along the Indus River — Pakistan’s main source of freshwater. And research from the the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany found water resources in northwest Iran could drop 50 percent should global warming increase by just 2°C.

The world is currently on track to blow past 2°C by the end of the century.

After the water is diverted away, a lot of it is used recklessly. Ranaghadr and other experts point to inefficient irrigation techniques such as spraying, which allows most of the water to evaporate uselessly from the fields. His department calculated that around 90 percent of the water that should flow into Lake Urmia is sprayed instead, and President Rouhani has estimated that Iran’s uses 92 percent of its water for agriculture, versus 80 percent in the United States.

“They turn open the tap, flood the land, without understanding that in our climate most of the water evaporates that way,” Ali Reza Seyed Ghoreishi, a member of the local water management council, told the Times. “We need to educate the farmers.”

The Iranian government also attempted to promote agriculture by breaking large landholdings into smaller properties. Most of the new owners promptly dug new wells to supply their crops, draining the groundwater. “There are around 30,000 legally dug wells and an equal amount of illegal wells,” said Seyed Ghoreishi. “As the water is becoming less, they have to dig deeper and deeper.”

Efficient water management generally requires either a working market where prices keep supply and demand tethered, or well-developed public institutions to manage the supply. Unfortunately, the developing world often has neither. A coalition of groups over the United Nations tried to quantify, in dollar terms, water use around the globe in April of 2013. They found West Asia, where Iran can found,was the third-most costly regional user of water in the world, right behind East Asia and North Africa.

Thanks to budget choices and international sanctions, Iran has not made any money available to restoration efforts for Lake Urmia. Iranian officials told the Times the lake is, at this point, probably unsalvageable.

 

ADB Releases Report on Managing the Water-Food-Energy Nexus

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September 2013: The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has released a report, titled 'Thinking About Water Differently: Managing the Water-Food-Energy Nexus,' which argues for recognition of water as an economic and social good and the urgent assurance of regional water security to eliminate risk to food and energy security in Asia and the Pacific.

According to the ADB report, which offers high-level guidance on water issues affecting the region, governments need to think differently about water, taking a longer-term view of the limited resource. It highlights the importance of the following strategic approaches: reforming water governance through advocacy at global, regional, and national levels; generating reliable data and information on the availability and behavior of water resources; resource protection through effective reduction of wastewater and other waste discharging into freshwater supplies through regulation, investment, and innovation; water for food through stimulating research into improving the use of water in agriculture, increasing food production on the same area of land, and using less water; and increasing storage including via aquifer recharge, as a response to uncertainties in supply that are being aggravated by climate change. [Publication: Thinking About Water Differently: Managing the Water-Food-Energy Nexus] [ADB Press Release]

More: http://energy-l.iisd.org/news/adb-releases-report-on-managing-the-water-food-energy-nexus/

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UNESCO Presents Views on Water Cooperation

September 2013: The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has released a report titled 'Free Flow. Reaching Water Security through Cooperation,' which was published in the framework of the International Year of Water Cooperation. The report brings together a range of water professionals and stakeholders to share their knowledge and experiences in water cooperation.

The report reflect the progress and challenges encountered in the fields of water management and cooperation around the world. It features chapters on, inter alia: water diplomacy; transboundary water management; water education and institutional development; financing cooperation; legal framework at the national/international level; water cooperation, sustainability and poverty eradication; and economic development and water.

The report includes articles presenting the views of experts on water cooperation from various regions, including: water diplomacy in the Middle East; transboundary water diplomacy in the Mekong region; the Nile Basin Initiative; efficient and effective cooperation in the River Rhine catchment; sharing water in Australia; regional water cooperation in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region; participation in the management of the Niger, Senegal and Congo river basins; the Murray–Darling Basin Plan; the transboundary ecosystem of Russia and Mongolia; Libya's experience in the management of transboundary aquifers; and transboundary groundwater resources management implemented in the Kumamoto region of Japan.

Issues addressed in the report include: climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR); agriculture; capacity building and education; financing; integrated water resources management (IWRM); managing water for livelihoods; poverty reduction and sustainable development; urban areas; and wetlands. [UNESCO Press Release] [Publication: Free Flow. Reaching Water Security through Cooperation]

read more: http://larc.iisd.org/news/unesco-presents-views-on-water-cooperation/

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Human Influence On Climate Clear, IPCC Report Says

It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. The evidence for this has grown, thanks to more and better observations, an improved understanding of the climate system response and improved climate models.

Warming in the climate system is unequivocal and since 1950 many changes have been observed throughout the climate system that are unprecedented over decades to millennia. Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850, reports the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Working Group I assessment report, Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis, approved on Friday by member governments of the IPCC in Stockholm, Sweden.

"Observations of changes in the climate system are based on multiple lines of independent evidence. Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased," said Qin Dahe, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I.

Thomas Stocker, the other Co-Chair of Working Group I said: "Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions."

"Global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century is projected to be likely to exceed 1.5°C relative to 1850 to 1900 in all but the lowest scenario considered, and likely to exceed 2°C for the two high scenarios," said Co-Chair Thomas Stocker. "Heat waves are very likely to occur more frequently and last longer. As Earth warms, we expect to see currently wet regions receiving more rainfall, and dry regions receiving less, although there will be exceptions," he added.

Projections of climate change are based on a new set of four scenarios of future greenhouse gas concentrations and aerosols, spanning a wide range of possible futures. The Working Group I report assessed global and regional-scale climate change for the early, mid-, and later 21st century.

"As the ocean warms, and glaciers and ice sheets reduce, global mean sea level will continue to rise, but at a faster rate than we have experienced over the past 40 years," said Co-Chair Qin Dahe. The report finds with high confidence that ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010.

Co-Chair Thomas Stocker concluded: "As a result of our past, present and expected future emissions of CO2, we are committed to climate change, and effects will persist for many centuries even if emissions of CO2 stop."

Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the IPCC, said: "This Working Group I Summary for Policymakers provides important insights into the scientific basis of climate change. It provides a firm foundation for considerations of the impacts of climate change on human and natural systems and ways to meet the challenge of climate change." These are among the aspects assessed in the contributions of Working Group II and Working Group III to be released in March and April 2014. The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report cycle concludes with the publication of its Synthesis Report in October 2014.

"I would like to thank the Co-Chairs of Working Group I and the hundreds of scientists and experts who served as authors and review editors for producing a comprehensive and scientifically robust summary. I also express my thanks to the more than one thousand expert reviewers worldwide for contributing their expertise in preparation of this assessment," said IPCC Chair Pachauri.

The Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (WGI AR5) is available at www.climatechange2013.org or www.ipcc.ch.

 

September 25, 2013, 2:54 p.m. ET Italy Calls for Food Security to Be U.N. Priority

ROME--Italy wants to shepherd efforts to make food security a priority for global policy makers, Prime Minister Enrico Letta said in his debut speech at the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday.

"We should address the root causes of the ills afflicting our world rather than limit ourselves to the side effects," Mr. Letta said. "The time has come to launch a new global consensus on food," he said.

In 2008, Italy, with limited financial firepower due to chronic fiscal problems, tried to make food security a signature theme at the Group of Eight summit in L'Aquila, Italy, prodding the largest economies to pledge as much as $15 billion for the cause. The global financial crisis then commanded vast public resources and attention, even though the serious spike in basic food prices that helped trigger the so-called Arab Spring sparked fear that easy monetary policies in developed economies would trigger runaway inflation in basic staples.

Commodity prices have since stabilized, according to a price-monitoring index set up by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome.

Mr. Letta said that the 2015 Expo, or world's fair, in Milan should be a springboard for global initiatives, floating the idea that a multilateral pact might be reached there.

The Milan Expo, whose slogan is "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life," aims to draw 20 million visitors interested in issues linked to sustainability. The event should be seized upon to create a Milan Protocol, modelled on the Kyoto Protocol of the late 1990s that covers environmental issues, with nutritional education, sustainable farming practices and food waste as its cardinal points, according to the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, a think tank backed by Barilla SpA, the pasta maker.

"Italy, with its rich food culture and heritage, is well-placed to show leadership in tackling the world's global food issues," said Danielle Nierenberg, an advisory board member at the Center.

Italy is also home to the U.N.'s main food-related agencies, the World Food Program, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the FAO, which after decades of advising farmers on how to boost yields is beginning to try to influence retail supply chains in an effort to reduce what it says is the waste of one-third of global food production. More

 

10 Water Commons Principles

July 11, 2012 | by On the Commons Team

Water

Through our co-creative fieldwork, On the Commons seeks to transform societal decision making for water stewardship toward participatory, democratic, community-centered systems that value equity and sustainability as a strategy. Our work is based on the following ten water commons principles.

1. Affirm water as a commons, that is, it belongs to everyone and no one, passed onto future generations in sufficient volume and quality
2. Ensure that the earth and all of its ecosystems enjoy rights to water for their survival – indeed it is on those ecosystems that human life depends
3. Conserve water as society’s first course of action (enforced by law), including suggesting drastic changes to industrial and agricultural practices
4. Treat watersheds – the source of water – as a common as well and not simply the water itself
5. Encourage local, community management while legally binding communities to respect upstream and downstream neighbors’ rights
6. Forge or affirm trans-boundary agreements that respect water sovereignty for both communities and nations
7. Provide water as a basic principle of justice, not as an act of charity
8. Ensure public delivery and fair pricing of water
9. Promote enshrining the right to water in nation-state constitutions, laws and a UN covenant
10. Employ innovative legal tools to protect water and manage water as a commons, including through public and community trusts

More

 

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity

Chapter 7. Grain Yields Starting to Plateau

From the beginning of agriculture until the mid-twentieth century, growth in the world grain harvest came almost entirely from expanding the cultivated area. Rises in land productivity were too slow to be visible within a single generation. It is only within the last 60 years or so that rising yields have replaced area expansion as the principal source of growth in world grain production. 1

The transition was dramatic. Between 1950 and 1973 the world’s farmers doubled the grain harvest, nearly all of it from raising yields. Stated otherwise, expansion during these 23 years equaled the growth in output from the beginning of agriculture until 1950. The keys to this phenomenal expansion were fertilization, irrigation, and higher-yielding varieties, coupled with strong economic incentives for production. 2

The first country to achieve a steady, sustained rise in grain yields was Japan, where the yield takeoff began in the 1880s. But for a half-century or so, it was virtually alone. Not until the mid-twentieth century did the United States and Western Europe launch a steady rise in grain yields. Shortly thereafter many other countries succeeded in boosting grain yields. 3

The average world grain yield in 1950 was 1.1 tons per hectare. In 2011, it was 3.3 tons per hectare—a tripling of the 1950 level. Some countries, including the United States and China, managed to quadruple grain yields, and all within a human life span. 4

Some of the factors influencing grain yields are natural, while others are of human origin. Natural conditions of inherent soil fertility, rainfall, day length, and solar intensity strongly influence crop yield potentials. Several areas of cropland with inherently high fertility are found widely scattered around the world: in the U.S. Midwest (often called the Corn Belt), Western Europe, the Gangetic Plain of India, and the North China Plain. It is the incredibly deep and rich soils of the U.S. Midwest that enables the United States to produce 40 percent of the world corn crop and 35 percent of the soybean crop. The state of Iowa, for instance, produces more grain than Canada and more soybeans than China. 5

The area west of the Alps, stretching across France to the English Channel and up to the North Sea, is also naturally very productive land, enabling densely populated Western Europe to produce an exportable surplus of wheat. 6

The region in northern India spanning the Punjab and the Gangetic Plain is India’s breadbasket. And the North China Plain produces half of China’s wheat and a third of its corn. 7

Aside from inherent soil fertility, the level and timing of rainfall, which vary widely among geographic regions, also strongly influence the productivity of land. Much of the world’s wheat, which is drought-tolerant, is grown without irrigation in regions with relatively low rainfall. Most wheat in the United States, Canada, and Russia, for example, is grown under these dryland conditions. Wheat is often grown in areas too dry or too cold to grow corn or rice. 8

Another natural factor that plays a major role in crop yields is day length. One reason that the United Kingdom and Germany have such high wheat yields is because they have a mild climate, compliments of the Gulf Stream, and can grow winter wheat. This wheat, planted in the fall, reaches several inches in height and then goes dormant as temperatures drop. With the arrival of spring, it grows rapidly, maturing during the longest days of the year in a high-latitude region that has very long days in May, June, and July. Wheat yields in these two northerly countries are close to 8 tons per hectare, somewhat higher than the 7 tons in France, simply because they are at a slightly higher latitude and thus have longer summer days. 9

The big differences between the United States and Western Europe are soil moisture and day length. In the United States, most wheat grows in the semiarid Great Plains, whereas in Europe it is produced on the well-watered, rainfed wheat fields of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The average U.S. wheat yield is scarcely 3 tons per hectare. But in Western Europe, wheat yields can range from 6 to 8 tons per hectare. 10

Just as long days promote high yields, the short days closer to the equator lead to relatively low yields. The advantage of the subtropical regions, however, is that they allow more than one crop per year, assuming sufficient soil moisture in the dry season. In land-scarce southern China, India, and other tropical/subtropical countries in Asia, double- or triple-cropping of rice is not uncommon. So although the yield per harvest is lower, the yield per year is much higher. 11

In northern India, for example, winter wheat with a summer rice crop is the dominant high-yielding combination. In China, combining winter wheat with corn as the summer crop in an annual cycle, plus the double cropping of rice, enables the country to produce the world’s largest grain harvest on a relatively modest area of arable land. 12

Solar intensity also plays an important role in determining the upper limits of crop yields. Rice yields in Japan, among the highest in Asia, are well below those in California. This is not because California’s rice farmers are more skilled than their Japanese counterparts but because Japan’s rice harvest grows mostly during the monsoon season, when there is extensive cloud cover, while California’s rice fields bask in bright sunlight. 13

Within this framework of natural conditions that help determine yields, plant breeders have made impressive progress in exploiting the yield potential. Japan has been a long-time leader. The originally domesticated wheats and rices tended to be taller, enabling them to compete with weeds for sunlight. But with weed control either by hand or mechanical cultivation, Japanese plant breeders realized that the tall grain could be shortened. By shortening the straw, a greater share of the plant’s photosynthate could be diverted to forming seeds, the edible part. 14

After Japanese “dwarf” wheats were introduced into the northwestern United States, Norman Borlaug, an agronomist based in Mexico, obtained some of the seeds in the early 1950s. He then introduced these dwarf wheats into other countries, including India and Pakistan, for testing under local growing conditions. Almost everywhere they were introduced they would double or even triple the yields of those from traditional wheat varieties. In Mexico, the dwarf wheats led to a quantum jump in wheat yields, nearly fourfold from 1950 to 2011. 15

Given the dramatic advances for the early dwarf wheats, in 1960 a similar effort with rice was launched at the newly created International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) at Los Baños in the Philippines. Under the leadership of Robert Chandler, scientists there drew on the experience with wheat to come up with some high-yielding dwarf rice varieties that were, like the wheats, widely adopted. IR8, one of the early strains, easily doubled yields in many countries. It was the first of many new highly productive rice strains to come from IRRI. 16

The new dwarf wheats and rices had the genetic potential to respond well to both irrigation and fertilizer. When fertilizer was applied to the old tall-strawed varieties, the plant would often fall over in a storm or even a heavy rain as the head of grain became heavier, leading to harvest losses. The new short, stiff-strawed varieties could support a much larger head of grain without toppling over. 17

In the 1930s, plant breeders in the United States were raising yields of corn with high-yielding hybrid varieties. It was discovered that, with the right combination of parent stock, hybridization could dramatically increase yields. As the new hybrids spread in the United States, corn yields began to climb, quintupling between 1940 and 2010. 18

In contrast to wheat and rice, where dwarfing held the key to raising yields, corn breeders have worked in recent decades to develop hybrids that would tolerate crowding, enabling farmers to grow more corn plants per acre. And since each plant typically produces one ear of corn, more plants mean more corn. A half-century ago farmers typically grew perhaps 10,000 corn plants per acre. Today states with adequate soil moisture have plant populations of 28,000 or more per acre. 19

Although people often ask about the potential to raise grain yields using genetic modification, success has thus far been limited. This is largely because plant breeders using traditional approaches were successful in doing almost everything plant scientists could think of to raise yields, leaving little potential for doing so through genetic modification. 20

The tripling of world irrigated area since 1950 has also helped raise grain yields by helping high-yielding crops realize their full genetic potential. And because irrigation removes moisture constraints, it also facilitates the greater use of fertilizer. 21

When German chemist Justus von Liebig demonstrated in 1847 that the major nutrients that plants removed from the soil could be applied in mineral form, he set the stage for the development of a new industry and a huge jump in world food production a century later. Of the 16 elements plants require to be properly nourished, three—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—totally dominate the world fertilizer industry. World fertilizer use climbed from 14 million tons in 1950 to 177 million tons in 2010, helping to boost the world grain harvest nearly fourfold. 22

As the world economy evolved from being largely rural to being highly urbanized, the natural nutrient cycle was disrupted. In traditional rural societies, food is consumed locally, and human an animal waste is returned to the land, completing the nutrient cycle. But in highly urbanized societies, where food is consumed far from where it is produced, using fertilizer to replace the lost nutrients is the only practical way to maintain land productivity. It thus comes as no surprise that the growth in fertilizer use closely tracks the growth in urbanization, with much of it concentrated in the last 60 years. 23

The big three grain producers—China, India, and the United States—account for 58 percent of world fertilizer use. In the United States, the growth in fertilizer use came to an end in 1980, but—in an encouraging sign—grain yields have continued to climb. China’s fertilizer use climbed rapidly in recent decades but has leveled off since 2007. While China uses nearly 50 million tons of fertilizer a year and India uses nearly 25 million tons, the United States uses only 20 million tons. 24

Given that China and the United States each produce roughly 400 million tons of grain, the grain produced per ton of fertilizer in the United States is more than double that of China. This is partly because American farmers are much more precise in matching application with need, but also partly because the United States is far and away the world’s largest soybean producer. The soybean, being a legume, fixes nitrogen in the soil that can be used by subsequent crops. U.S. farmers regularly plant corn and soybeans in a two-year rotation, thus reducing the amount of nitrogen fertilizer that has to be applied for the corn. 25

In most countries outside of sub-Saharan Africa, grain yields have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled. Aside from having some of the world’s inherently least fertile soils and a largely semiarid climate, sub-Saharan Africa lacks the infrastructure and modern inputs needed to support modern agriculture. 26

Recent experience in Malawi, however, illustrates the potential for improvement. After a drought in 2005, many of the country’s 13 million people were left hungry or starving. In response, the government issued coupons to small farmers, entitling them to 200 pounds of fertilizer at a greatly reduced price and free packets of improved seed corn, the national food staple. Funded partly by outside donors, this fertilizer and seed subsidy program helped nearly double Malawi’s corn harvest within two years, enabling it to export grain and boost farmers’ incomes. With economic incentives and access to modern inputs, principally higher-yielding seed and fertilizer, farmers in sub-Saharan Africa can easily double yields. 27

At 10 tons per hectare, U.S. corn yields are the highest of any major grain anywhere. In Iowa, with its deep soils and near-ideal climate for corn, some counties harvest up to 13 tons per hectare. In China, yields of each of its “big three” grains—wheat, rice, and corn—now range between 4 and 6 tons. Wheat yields in India have more than quadrupled since 1950, climbing to 3 tons per hectare. Remember, all grain yields in India are lower than in the United States, Europe, or China because India is close to the equator, where yields are restricted by short day length. 28

Rising yields are the key to expanding the grain harvest. Since 1950, over 93 percent of world grain harvest growth has come from raising yields. Expanding area accounts for the other 7 percent. 29

Impressive though the growth is over the last 60 years, the pace has slowed during the last two decades. Between 1950 and 1990, the world grain yield increased by an average of 2.2 percent a year. From 1990 to 2011, the annual rise slowed to 1.3 percent. In some agriculturally advanced countries, the dramatic climb in yields has come to an end as yields have plateaued. 30

For example, the rice yield per hectare in Japan, after climbing for more than a century, has not increased at all over the last 17 years. It is not that Japanese farmers do not want to continue raising their rice yields. They do. With a domestic support price far above the world market price, raising yields in Japan is highly profitable. The problem is that Japan’s farmers are already using all the technologies available to raise land productivity. 31

Like Japan, South Korea’s rice yield also has plateaued. Interestingly, it plateaued at almost exactly the same level as the rice yield in Japan did, and while Japan’s plateauing began in 1994, South Korea’s began in 1996. The constraints on rice yields appear to be essentially the same in both countries. Yields there have hit a glass ceiling, a limit that is apparently imposed by day length, solar intensity, and, ultimately, the constraints of photosynthetic efficiency. Japan and South Korea together produce 12 million tons of rice annually, 3 percent of the world rice harvest. 32 More

 

Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

Virtually every past civilization has eventually undergone collapse, a loss of socio-political-economic complexity usually accompanied by a dramatic decline in population size [1]. Some, such as those of Egypt and China, have recovered from collapses at various stages; others, such as that of Easter Island or the Classic Maya, were apparently permanent [1,2]. All those previous collapses were local or regional; elsewhere, other societies and civilizations persisted unaffected. Sometimes, as in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, new civilizations rose in succession. In many, if not most, cases, overexploitation of the environment was one proximate or an ultimate cause [3].

But today, for the first time, humanity's global civilization—the worldwide, increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in which we all are to one degree or another, embedded—is threatened with collapse by an array of environmental problems. Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’ [4], facing what the UK's Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems [5]. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival; land degradation and land-use change; a pole-to-pole spread of toxic compounds; ocean acidification and eutrophication (dead zones); worsening of some aspects of the epidemiological environment (factors that make human populations susceptible to infectious diseases); depletion of increasingly scarce resources [6,7], including especially groundwater, which is being overexploited in many key agricultural areas [8]; and resource wars [9]. These are not separate problems; rather they interact in two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system. The negative manifestations of these interactions are often referred to as ‘the human predicament’ [10], and determining how to prevent it from generating a global collapse is perhaps theforemost challenge confronting humanity.

The human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo sapiens’ aggregate consumption [11–17]. How far the human population size now is above the planet's long-term carrying capacity is suggested (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis [18–20]. It shows that to support today's population of seven billion sustainably (i.e. with business as usual, including current technologies and standards of living) would require roughly half an additional planet; to do so, if all citizens of Earth consumed resources at the US level would take four to five more Earths. Adding the projected 2.5 billion more people by 2050 would make the human assault on civilization's life-support systems disproportionately worse, because almost everywhere people face systems with nonlinear responses [11,21–23], in which environmental damage increases at a rate that becomes faster with each additional person. Of course, the claim is often made that humanity will expand Earth's carrying capacity dramatically with technological innovation [24], but it is widely recognized that technologies can both add and subtract from carrying capacity. The plough evidently first expanded it and now appears to be reducing it [3]. Overall, careful analysis of the prospects does not provide much confidence that technology will save us [25] or that gross domestic product can be disengaged from resource use [26].

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2. Do current trends portend a collapse?

What is the likelihood of this set of interconnected predicaments [27] leading to a global collapse in this century? There have been many definitions and much discussion of past ‘collapses’ [1,3,28–31], but a future global collapse does not require a careful definition. It could be triggered by anything from a ‘small’ nuclear war, whose ecological effects could quickly end civilization [32], to a more gradual breakdown because famines, epidemics and resource shortages cause a disintegration of central control within nations, in concert with disruptions of trade and conflicts over increasingly scarce necessities. In either case, regardless of survivors or replacement societies, the world familiar to anyone reading this study and the well-being of the vast majority of people would disappear.

How likely is such a collapse to occur? No civilization can avoid collapse if it fails to feed its population. The world's success so far, and the prospective ability to feed future generations at least as well, has been under relatively intensive discussion for half a century [33–40]. Agriculture made civilization possible, and over the last 80 years or so, an industrial agricultural revolution has created a technology-dependent global food system. That system, humanity's single biggest industry, has generated miracles of food production. But it has also created serious long-run vulnerabilities, especially in its dependence on stable climates, crop monocultures, industrially produced fertilizers and pesticides, petroleum, antibiotic feed supplements and rapid, efficient transportation.

Despite those food production miracles, today at least two billion people are hungry or poorly nourished. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that increasing food production by some 70 per cent would be required to feed a 35 per cent bigger and still growing human population adequately by 2050 [41]. What are the prospects that H. sapiens can produce and distribute sufficient food? To do so, it probably will be necessary to accomplish many or all of the following tasks: severely limit climate disruption; restrict expansion of land area for agriculture (to preserve ecosystem services); raise yields where possible; put much more effort into soil conservation [3]; increase efficiency in the use of fertilizers, water and energy; become more vegetarian; grow more food for people (not fuel for vehicles); reduce food wastage; stop degradation of the oceans and better regulate aquaculture; significantly increase investment in sustainable agricultural and aquacultural research; and move increasing equity and feeding everyone to the very top of the policy agenda.

Most of these long-recommended tasks require changes in human behaviour thus far elusive. The problem of food wastage and the need for more and better agricultural research have been discussed for decades. So have ‘technology will save us’ schemes such as building ‘nuclear agro-industrial complexes’ [42], where energy would be so cheap that it could support a new kind of desert agriculture in ‘food factories’, where crops would be grown on desalinated water and precisely machine fertilized. Unhappily, sufficiently cheap energy has never been produced by nuclear power to enable large-scale agriculture to move in that direction. Nor has agriculture moved towards feeding people protein extracted from leaves or bacteria grown on petroleum [43, pp. 95–112]. None of these schemes has even resulted in a coordinated development effort. Meanwhile, growing numbers of newly well-off people have increased demand for meat [44], thereby raising global demand for feedgrains.

Perhaps even more critical, climate disruption may pose insurmountable biophysical barriers to increasing crop yields. Indeed, if humanity is very unlucky with the climate, there may be reductions in yields of major crops [45], although near-term this may be unlikely to affect harvests globally [46]. Nonetheless, rising temperatures already seem to be slowing previous trends of increasing yields of basic grains [45,47], and unless greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced, dangerous anthropogenic climate change [48] could ravage agriculture. Also, in addition to falling yields from many oceanic fish stocks because of widespread overfishing [49], warming and acidification of the oceans threaten the protein supply of some of the most nutritionally vulnerable people [50], especially those who cannot afford to purchase farmed fish.

Unfortunately, the agricultural system has complex connections with all the chief drivers of environmental deterioration. Agriculture itself is a major emitter of greenhouse gases and thus is an important cause of climate disruption as well as being exceptionally vulnerable to its consequences. More than a millennium of change in temperature and precipitation patterns is apparently now entrained [51], with the prospect of increasingly severe storms, droughts, heat waves and floods, all of which seem already evident and all of which threaten agricultural production.

Land is an essential resource for farming, and one facing multiple threats. In addition to the serious and widespread problems of soil degradation, sea-level rise (the most certain consequence of global warming) will take important areas out of production either by inundating them (a 1 m rise would flood 17.5% of Bangladesh [52]), exposing them to more frequent storm surges, or salinizing coastal aquifers essential for irrigation water. Another important problem for the food system is the loss of prime farmland to urbanization, a trend that seems certain to accelerate [53] as population growth steadily erodes the per capita supply of farmland.

The critical importance of substantially boosting the inadequate current action on the demographic problem can be seen in the time required to change the trajectory of population growth humanely and sensibly. We know from such things as the World War II mobilizations that many consumption patterns can be altered dramatically within a year, given appropriate incentives [54]. If food shortages became acute, then a rapid reaction would ensue as hunger became much more widespread. Food prices would rise, and diets would temporarily change (e.g. the number of meals consumed per day or amount of meat consumed) to compensate the shortage. Over the long term, however, expanding the global food supply and distributing it more equitably would be a slow and difficult process. Even though a major famine might well provoke investment in long-needed improvements in food production and distribution, they would take time to plan, test and implement.

Furthermore, agriculture is a leading cause of losses of biodiversity and thus of the critical ecosystem services supplied to agriculture itself (e.g. pollination, pest control, soil fertility, climate stability) and other human enterprises. Farming is also a principal source of global toxification, as has been clear since the days of Carson [55], exposing the human population to myriad subtle poisons. These pose further potential risks to food production.

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3. What needs to be done to avoid a collapse?

The threat from climate disruption to food production alone means that humanity's entire system for mobilizing energy needs to be rapidly transformed. Warming must be held well below a potential 5°C rise in global average temperature, a level that could well bring down civilization [56]. The best estimate today may be that, failing rapid concerted action, the world is already committed to a 2.4°C increase in global average temperature [57]. This is significantly above the 2°C estimated a decade ago by climate scientists to be a ‘safe’ limit, but now considered by some analysts to be too dangerous [58,59], a credible assessment, given the effects seen already before reaching a one degree rise. There is evidence, moreover, that present models underestimate future temperature increase by overestimating the extent that growth of vegetation can serve as a carbon sink [60] and underestimating positive feedbacks [61].

Many complexities plague the estimation of the precise threats of anthropogenic climate disruption, ranging from heat deaths and spread of tropical diseases to sea-level rise, crop failures and violent storms. One key to avoiding a global collapse, and thus an area requiring great effort and caution is avoiding climate-related mass famines. Our agricultural system evolved in a geological period of relatively constant and benign climate and was well attuned to twentieth-century conditions. That alone is cause for substantial concern as the planet's climates rapidly shift to new, less predictable regimes. It is essential to slow that process. That means dramatically transforming much of the existing energy mobilization infrastructure [62] and changing human behaviour to make the energy system much more efficient. This ispossible; indeed, sensible plans for doing it have been put forward [63,64], and some progress has been made. The central challenge, of course, is to phase out more than half of the global use of fossil fuels by 2050 in order to forestall the worst impacts of climate disruption, a challenge the latest International Energy Agency edition of World Energy Outlook makes look more severe [65]. This highlights another dilemma. Fossil fuels are now essential to agriculture for fertilizer and pesticide manufacture, operation of farm machinery, irrigation (often wasteful), livestock husbandry, crop drying, food storage, transportation and distribution. Thus, the phase-out will need to include at least partial substitution of non-fossil fuels in these functions, and do so without greatly increasing food prices. More