Global unsustainable virtual water flows in agricultural trade

Rosa, Lorenzo; Chiarelli, Davide Danilo; Tu, Chuanyi; Rulli, Maria Cristina; D’Odorico, Paolo

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ab4bfc

Cited by 137 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…We used a global process-based crop water model to calculate the CWR for 130 primary crops or 26 crop classes (or nearly 100% of global crop production) for the 1996-2005 period using monthly climate forcing while keeping the spatial extent of global croplands fixed to the MIRCA2000 dataset (48). This model has been extensively used to assess spatially explicit CWR (4,10,49). CWR is the amount of water needed by a crop to satisfy its evapotranspirative demand and to avoid water-limited plant growth.…”

Section: Assessment Of Green and Blue Water Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global agricultural economic water scarcity

et al. 2020

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Water scarcity raises major concerns on the sustainable future of humanity and the conservation of important ecosystem functions. To meet the increasing food demand without expanding cultivated areas, agriculture will likely need to introduce irrigation in croplands that are currently rain-fed but where enough water would be available for irrigation. “Agricultural economic water scarcity” is, here, defined as lack of irrigation due to limited institutional and economic capacity instead of hydrologic constraints. To date, the location and productivity potential of economically water scarce croplands remain unknown. We develop a monthly agrohydrological analysis to map agricultural regions affected by agricultural economic water scarcity. We find these regions account for up to 25% of the global croplands, mostly across Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. Sustainable irrigation of economically water scarce croplands could feed an additional 840 million people while preventing further aggravation of blue water scarcity.

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Section: Assessment Of Green and Blue Water Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global agricultural economic water scarcity

et al. 2020

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“…Rosa et al, 2018). In the specific context of agriculture, sustainable irrigation strategies need to allow for an increase in crop production to meet rising food needs, while ensuring that natural resources (e.g., groundwater stocks, freshwater ecosystems, and water quality) are not irreversibly depleted (Borsato et al, 2019;Rosa et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weak and Strong Sustainability of Irrigation: A Framework for Irrigation Practices Under Limited Water Availability

Borsato

Rosa

Marinello

et al. 2020

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Agriculture strongly relies on irrigation. While irrigated land accounts for roughly 20% of the global cultivated area, it contributes to about 40% of crop production. In the last few decades, the growing demand for agricultural commodities has translated into an increasing pressure on the global freshwater resources, often leading to their unsustainable use. Here we investigate the sustainability of irrigation, balancing farmers' profit generation objectives and the needs of ecological systems. We ask the question "sustainability of what?" to stress how the sustainability of irrigation is often evaluated with respect the opposing needs of humans and nature. While from the farmers' perspective irrigation is sustainable when it provides uninterrupted access to water resources at a price not exceeding the marginal revenue they generate (clearly without accounting for environmental externalities), from the standpoint of water resources, irrigation is sustainable if it does not deplete freshwater stocks or environmental flows. We invoke the notions of "weak" and "strong" sustainability to develop a novel framework for the evaluation of tradeoffs between human needs and the conservation of natural capital. Through the analysis of criteria of performance, we relate water deficit and irrigation overuse to the reliability and resilience of irrigation. This approach is applied to the case of Australia, a major agricultural country affected by water scarcity. The application of the framework to the case of Australia shows how this approach can be used to highlight areas in which irrigation contributes to a weakly sustainable use of water resources with impacts on environmental flows and groundwater stocks. Solutions, such as increasing efficiencies or reducing water applications through the adoption of deficit irrigation, can enhance water sustainability in some water scarce locations.

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“…Such pilot estimates suggest that about 40% of irrigation water currently abstracted from surface water bodies is at the expense of environmental flows and needs to be reset ( Table 1). In addition, roughly 20% of irrigation water use is depleting groundwater bodies (Döll et al, 2012;Wada et al, 2012bWada et al, , 2016b, indicating that 50-60% of current global irrigation practice is unsustainable (Rosa et al, 2019). Most recently, EFR methods have been implemented in global gridded crop models, linking overdraft to food production (Jägermeyr et al, 2017;Rosa et al, 2018;Pastor et al, 2019;Gerten et al, 2020).…”

Section: Irrigated Farming-ratchet and Hatchetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agriculture's Historic Twin-Challenge Toward Sustainable Water Use and Food Supply for All

Jägermeyr

2020

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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A sustainable and just future, envisioned by the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, puts agricultural systems under a heavy strain. The century-old quandary to provide ever-growing human populations with sufficient food takes on a new dimension with the recognition of environmental limits for agricultural resource use. To highlight challenges and opportunities toward sustainable food security in the twenty first century, this perspective paper provides a historical account of the escalating pressures on agriculture and freshwater resources alike, supported by new quantitative estimates of the ascent of excessive human water use. As the transformation of global farming into sustainable forms is unattainable without a revolution in agricultural water use, water saving and food production potentials are put into perspective with targets outlined by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The literature body and here-confirmed global estimates of untapped opportunities in farm water management indicate that these measures could sustainably intensify today's farming systems at scale. While rigorous implementation of sustainable water withdrawals (SDG 6.4) might impinge upon 5% of global food production, scaling-up water interventions in rainfed and irrigated systems could over-compensate such losses and further increase global production by 30% compared to the current situation (SDG 2.3). Without relying on future technological fixes, traditional on-farm water and soil management provides key strategies associated with important synergies that needs better integration into agro-ecological landscape approaches. Integrated strategies for sustainable intensification of agriculture within planetary boundaries are a potential way to attain several SDGs, but they are not yet receiving attention from high-level development policies.

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Global unsustainable virtual water flows in agricultural trade

Cited by 137 publications

References 46 publications

Global agricultural economic water scarcity

Global agricultural economic water scarcity

Weak and Strong Sustainability of Irrigation: A Framework for Irrigation Practices Under Limited Water Availability

Agriculture's Historic Twin-Challenge Toward Sustainable Water Use and Food Supply for All

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