<aside> 💡
AI Summary:
Source: “'The real threat to our future is peak water.' As population rises, overpumping means some nations have reached peak water, threatening food supply, says Lester Brown.”
Source: "WRI-Aqueduct, with support from Danida (the Danish development aid agency) and the Skoll Global Threats Fund, is developing an online tool that will help policymakers identify global water risk and food security hot spots. The risks are not always obvious. A country can be relatively water-secure within its own borders, but still be highly dependent on food imports, some of which come from countries whose agricultural production systems face very high levels of water risk. In poor countries, price spikes can put food out of the reach of many citizens. The new WRI Aqueduct tool aims to shed light on these types of threats."
Source: Water Risk Atlas
Source: Water in the Anthropocene
Source: Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here: One of the driest countries on Earth now makes more freshwater than it needs
Source: "About 20% of Delhi's population have no access to piped water and have to be supplied by water tankers. But the difference between demand and supply is more than 750 million litres a day.”
Source: “The FAO flagship report on ‘The Impact of Disasters on Agriculture and Food Security’ provides a timely and comprehensive overview of how disasters are affecting agriculture and food security around the world. Building on previous work of the FAO on this topic, the report estimates losses caused by disasters on agricultural production over the past three decades and delves into the diverse threats and impacts affecting the crops, livestock, forestry, and fisheries and aquaculture subsectors. It analyzes the complex interplay of underlying risks, such as climate change, pandemics, epidemics and armed conflicts, and how they drive disaster risk in agriculture and agrifood systems at large. The report provides examples of actions and strategies for investing in resilience and proactively addressing risks in agriculture. It demonstrates ways to mainstream disaster risk into agricultural practices and policies and calls for a deeper understanding of the context in which these solutions are implemented.”
Source: "The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that global agricultural production will need to more than double by 2050 to close the gap between food supply and demand. The FAO found this year that over 5 per cent of the population in 79 developing countries would be undernourished."
Source: Food system shock: The insurance impacts of acute disruption to global food supply: “Closing the gap between food production and supply is an essential component of improving food security. However, the ability of the world food system to achieve this is under chronic pressure from global population growth and shifting consumption patterns. While many food security discussions have focused exclusively on this pressure, little work has been done to explore the global food system’s growing vulnerability to acute disruption. Lloyd’s commissioned the development of a scenario of an acute but plausible disruption to global food production and its consequences to explore the implications for insurance and risk. The scenario – developed by experts in food security and sustainable development economics – was peer-reviewed by a diverse group of leading academics, before being presented to insurance industry practitioners for assessment at two workshops. The scenario described in this report is not a prediction; it is an exploration of what might happen based on past events and scientific, social and economic theory.”
Source: Famine Early Warning Systems Network
Source: Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues
Source: “The stark claim that the world has only 100; 60 or even 30 years of harvests left often hits the headlines. Although they continue to be repeated, there is no scientific basis to them. While the claims are overblown, soil erosion is an important problem. Erosion rates from across the world span five orders of magnitude. Some are eroding quickly: 16% of soils are estimated to have a lifespan of less than 100 years. Others are eroding slowly: half have a lifespan greater than 1000 years; and one-third have over 5000 years. To protect our soils we must adopt better agricultural practices – such as cover cropping, minimal or no tillage, and contour cultivation. This way we can extend the lifespan of the soils that we all depend on.”
Source: “...we’re already causing increasingly extreme weather events that may soon become severe and frequent enough to cause what’s called ‘synchronous failure.’ This is where multiple stresses across human-made systems lead to catastrophic collapses in their functioning. These collapses, given how interconnected our global system is, can affect one country directly but lead to the failure of our finance systems or global supply chains in many others... Think of the global economy as a never-ending game of tile-matching video game Tetris, where the movement of cargo ships, trains, lorries and planes gently fits together in an orderly sequence. This is made possible thanks to efficient logistics, where everything arrives ‘just in time’ to minimise costs and maximise profit. It’s why your local supermarket has evolved to not require a small warehouse at the back. The problem is that this just-in-time economy has been designed around assumptions of a stable world, in which an action always leads to a simple and predictable outcome. But it now sits on top of a hugely unstable and complex platform—our physical world, increasingly disrupted by climate change. In other words, no more smooth-running Tetris. We are already experiencing this unstable platform. Droughts and heat have reduced global cereal production by 9-10%. The onion harvest was so compromised in 2018 that Latvia declared a natural disaster, and Lithuania a state of emergency. In Syria, an intense three-year drought contributed heavily to a crash in food production, which combined with other complex pressures to bring about the country’s collapse. In the future, food shocks are likely to get much worse. The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing, and rises much faster beyond 1.5℃ of global heating—a threshold we could hit as early as 2030 should emissions continue unchecked. Such shocks pose grave threats—rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial losses, starvation and death.”
Image source: A map showing every ship in the world
Source: “Simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security. Concurrent weather extremes driven by a strongly meandering jet stream could trigger such events, but so far this has not been quantified. Specifically, the ability of state-of-the art crop and climate models to adequately reproduce such high impact events is a crucial component for estimating risks to global food security. Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models. While climate models accurately simulate atmospheric patterns, associated surface weather anomalies and negative effects on crop responses are mostly underestimated in bias-adjusted simulations. Given the identified model biases, future assessments of regional and concurrent crop losses from meandering jet states remain highly uncertain. Our results suggest that model-blind spots for such high-impact but deeply-uncertain hazards have to be anticipated and accounted for in meaningful climate risk assessments.” Summary article.
Source: “[There are] nearer-term risks of a global food crisis in coming decades, such as a multi-breadbasket failure — due not just to climate change, but a combination of factors including population growth, industrial soil degradation, rising energy costs, groundwater depletion, among other trends. Taken in context with a number of climate change models produced over the last decade, the heightened risk of droughts in the 2020s means that a global food crisis could be imminent. Over 1,700 published climate models examined by the University of Leeds point to the risk of a global food crisis after 2030; and 12 models point to this risk emerging and amplifying in just three years... by 2040 as much as 40 percent of all irrigated crops will face acute water stress. This could impact a number of major crops... rice, wheat and maize will be significantly affected... For the 2030s period, a third of climate projections portend yield decreases greater than 10 percent, and a tenth of projections are greater than 25 percent. For the 2040s and 2050s, most climate projections (over 70 percent of them) show yield decreases, whose magnitude increases over time. Through the second half of the century, 67 percent of portended yield decreases are greater than 10 percent, and 26 percent of projected yield decreases are greater than 25 percent... This in turn could dramatically impact food availability around the world, as an estimated 90 percent of the global population lives in countries which import over four-fifths of their staple food crops from regions that irrigate crops by depleting groundwater... [and] as many people as live in Africa would need to migrate due to water shortages... If global average temperatures rise by 2.7 degrees Celsius, the number of people living under ‘absolute water scarcity’ (less than 500 cubic metres per capita per year) would increase by 40 percent, and according to some models, more than 100 percent... carrying on within the current global food system with no change of course, and maintaining our chronic dependence on fossil fuels, will lead us into a world in which over 50 percent of the entire human population — 4.2 billion people — would be at risk of undernourishment by 2050.”