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50 percent Of Global Food Production ‘At Risk’ Because Of Water Crisis

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One of the biggest issues facing humanity in the 21st century is the water crisis, with water stress and scarcity now affecting more than two billion people around the world and demand starting to outstrip supply in many nations for several months out of the year.

 

In order to meet basic needs, each person on earth needs between 50 and 100 litres of water each day to cover them for drinking, cooking and personal hygiene. But it’s also important to factor in the amount of water that’s required to produce food on a global scale.

 

When you consider that the average daily calorie intake of an adult human is around 2,800 kilocalories per day and this requires between 2,000 and 5,000 litres of water per person to support, the fact that global water supplies are now starting to dwindle becomes even more stark.

 

As explained by the Center For Strategic & International Studies, agricultural practices around the world make up 72 per cent of all freshwater abstraction from rivers, lakes and groundwater aquifers… almost 3,000 cubic kilometres of water.

 

To put this into some kind of perspective, it takes more than 15,000 litres of water to raise 1kg of beef, with most of this used to grow crops to feed the cattle. And it takes more than 1,800 litres to harvest 1kg of wheat.

 

Consequently, water and food security are closely linked, with water scarcity affecting both quality, quantity and seasonal variety of the food produced. Stress on supply, therefore, can affect the food security for hundreds of millions of people. Low food reserves also have the knock-on effect of driving up food prices, which also puts people at risk.

 

New water economics

 

A new landmark review from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW), published on October 15th, has found that over 50 per cent of food production around the world will be at risk of failure inside the next 25 years because of the accelerating water crisis… unless action is taken urgently to safeguard supplies and protect the essential ecosystems on which freshwater resources depend.

 

As the report explains, the global hydrological cycle is now out of balance for the first time in human history, but this growing water disaster can be addressed if more collective work is undertaken more quickly.

 

Restoring water cycle stability will help ensure that all earth’s ecosystems are protected, while preserving food security, support economies and job opportunities, and ensure a future that’s equitable and sustainable for one and all.

 

To address the myriad challenges the world now faces, the GCEW is calling for a new economics of water, a framework that will be bolder, more integrated and which recognises the hydrological cycle as a global common good.

 

The key, it argues, is understanding how the cycle connects countries all over the world through both the water that is visible and atmospheric moisture flows, and how connected it is with climate change and biodiversity loss, impacting on near-enough all the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).

 

Current approaches to water management typically consider blue water – that which is observable in aquifers, lakes and rivers. Green water – that which is stored in vegetation and as soil moisture, returning to the air through evaporation and transpiration – is largely overlooked.

 

Another issue is that water strategies often assume that annual water supply patterns will be stable year on year, but this is no longer the case, with rainfall patterns starting to shift because of changes in land use and global warming causing destabilisation.

 

The water cycle and climate change, as well as biodiversity depletion, are now all deeply intertwined, with each one reinforcing the other. By ensuring that green water supplies in soil are stable, natural systems are more easily sustained, able to continue absorbing significant amounts of carbon dioxide created by fossil fuel combustion.

 

However, as more and more soil moisture and wetlands are lost on a global scale, coupled with deforestation, some of our most important carbon stores are now being lost, which is driving global warming. This, in turn, is leading to more extreme heatwaves, which increases moisture loss.

 

As such, it is now necessary to view water scarcity impacts holistically, considering how they affect people and nature, and how they’re putting the SDGs at serious risk.

 

If nothing is done – and soon – gaps in nutrition will continue to grow among populations that are already at risk, diseases will spread unabated, inequalities within and across nations will grow, and more forced migration and conflicts will be seen.

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