Water Security

The Water-Food-Energy-Climate Nexus

The World Economic Forum Water Initiative

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781597267366
  9781597267359
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610910262
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Biological Sciences

The world is on the brink of the greatest crisis it has ever faced: a spiraling lack of fresh water. Groundwater is drying up, even as water demands for food production, for energy, and for manufacturing are surging. Water is already emerging as a headline geopolitical issue—and worsening water security will soon have dire consequences in many parts of the global economic system.
Directed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon at the 2008 Davos Annual Meeting, the World Economic Forum assembled the world’s foremost group of public, private, non-governmental-organization and academic experts to examine the water crisis issue from all perspectives. The result of their work is this forecast—a stark, non-technical overview of where we will be by 2025 if we take a business-as-usual approach to (mis)managing our water resources. The findings are shocking. Perhaps equally stunning are the potential solutions and the recommendations that the group presents. All are included in this landmark publication.
 
Water Security contains compelling commentary from leading decision-makers, past and present. The commentary is supported by analysis from leading academics of how the world economy will be affected if world leaders cannot agree on solutions. The book suggests how business and politics need to manage the energy-food-water-climate axis as leaders negotiate the details of the climate regime that replace Kyoto Protocols.

CHAPTER 1

Agriculture

This chapter explores the water-food nexus. It benefits greatly from the perspectives of many public, private, academic, and NGO representatives who have taken part in various Forum sessions and workshops on water issues over the last three years. Some personal perspectives from specific leaders close to the water and food agenda appear at the end of the chapter.

Background

In 1972, the Club of Rome released a report titled The Limits to Growth. Using state-of-the-art economic modeling, the Club of Rome report drew rather startling conclusions that warned of the food shortages and environmental consequences that could come with unfettered population and economic expansion into the 21st century.

In general, The Limits to Growth was stereotyped as either a neo-Malthusian projection of population collapse caused by global shortages of food and other natural resources, or a critique of economic growth suggesting that the world should shift to a steady but much poorer state.

Since 1972, the earth's human population has increased by more than two billion people. Global wealth has increased dramatically. We have witnessed a Green Revolution in agriculture across the developing world. Many people now eat much better diets than they did forty years ago.

So was Limits to Growth wrong?

In fact, it had something slightly different to say than is more popularly thought. Writing in 2010, Professor Jorgen Randers, one of the study's original authors, pointed out that “very few seem to know that Limits to Growth was in fact a scenario analysis of 12 possible futures from 1972 to 2100. And that the main scientific conclusion of the study was that delays in global decision-making would cause the human economy to overshoot planetary limits before the growth in the human ecological footprint slowed. Once in unsustainable territory, human society would be forced to reduce its rate of resource use and its rate of emissions.”¹

Professor Randers reflected that if only they had the words back in 1972, they could have called the report “Limits to Our Environmental Footprint.” The intent was not to recommend a limit to economic growth per se, but to recommend a lowering of the environmental impact per unit of GDP, and a simultaneous step change in the efficiency per unit of natural resource used.

The need for human society to make such a step change in resource-use efficiency—in order to get the same utility, if not more, from a smaller stock of natural resources—is the technician's way of expressing what has now become something of a mantra in agricultural hydrology circles: how to get more “crop per drop.” Thus the challenge the Club of Rome identified in 1972 is very close to the challenge our global agriculture sector now faces with regard to water: how to get much more crop with many fewer drops?

Another feature worth noting in the Club of Rome's report is how the economic warning that something needed to change might play out. As growth under business-as-usual conditions “overshot” planetary limits, they predicted shocks to the system arising from the collapse of resource stocks, perhaps in the early 21st century, which in turn would be reflected in the market.

Arguably, the early stages of these signals are now starting to be seen. As this book goes to press in the autumn of 2010, there has been a summer heat wave across the Northern Hemisphere, creating unprecedented and prolonged hot spells from Russia through to India; erratic weather patterns, causing catastrophic floods in Pakistan; floods and mud slides in Brazil, China, and Europe; and the worst drought in more than one hundred years in southwest China, the worst drought in twenty years in Thailand, continued drought in North and West Australia, and unprecedented droughts in Afghanistan, across the Caribbean, and in Kenya. There have also been recent and unprecedented price spikes in wheat and coco prices, sustained high prices in sugar as supply tightens, and a soaring cotton price “heralding the end of cheap clothes,” according to some commentators. This amalgam of headlines could have been one of Professor Janders's scenarios back in 1972.

As predicted, the market now seems to be sending us early signals about challenges to our food security. The question is, should we be concerned, and if so, how should we respond?

Published by the International Water Management Institute in 2007, Water for Food, Water for Life: A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture sought to address these exact issues. Seven hundred leading scientists collaborated to produce the report, and its 645 pages were peer reviewed by fifty experts. It is the best scientific sourcebook available on the global challenge of water for agriculture. It concluded that we should indeed be concerned. Specifically the study asked is there enough land, water, and human capacity to produce food for a growing population over the next fifty years. Its sobering answer is no, unless we act to improve water use in agriculture.

The report expresses in evocative terms the pressure agriculture exerts on our freshwater supplies: “Imagine a canal 10 meters deep, 100 meters wide, and 7.1 million kilometers long (enough to go around the world 180 times). That is the amount of water it takes each year to produce food for today's 6.5 billion people. Add 2–3 billion more people and accommodate their changing diets, from cereals to more meat and vegetables, and that could add another 5 million kilometers to the channel of water needed to feed the world's people.”²

Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, agrees. As she wrote in a summary of the 2008 World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council discussions on the environment and sustainability:

To feed ourselves the world will need to double food production in the next 40 years to meet projected demand. Among the middle classes, global demand for meat alone is expected to increase by 50% between now and 2025. Among the poorest today, over one billion people—one-sixth of the world's population—do not have access to adequate food and nutrition. And an increase in two billion people is expected by 2025, with population growth highest in the poorest parts of the world. In contrast, an estimated 33% of food in richer countries gets wasted. Still, we will have to produce even more food in the future and food of higher protein content. But our ability to meet current and future production needs is seriously challenged by increasing water scarcity, climate change, and volatile energy costs and supplies. Unless we change how we do it, we will not be able to supply our future food needs.³

But the issue of agriculture and water availability is not straightforward. It has several facets, including the provision of the right quantity of water at the right time and at the right level of quality. This complexity introduces different risks to farmers across the globe and thus requires specifically tailored solutions to the farmers’ needs, based on the water availability, climatic conditions, agriculture practices, soil, economics, policies, regulation, and so on. Water is local.

Examples of such tailored solutions to local conditions include the use of drought-tolerant crops to mitigate drought risks, salinity-resistant crops (as required in many parts of India), and drainage and other tools to address flooding or too much moisture (as in the case of the 2010 Pakistan flood). More efficient irrigation, measurement, and integrated stress management (both “biotic”—to manage insects, weeds, fungi, etc.—and “abiotic”—to manage water, heat, cold, etc.) is also crucial. This can help optimize the utilization of water on a field, combating challenges such as weeds, which compete with the crops for nutrition and water, and pests damaging the crop and yield, thus reducing growth and the effectiveness of the applied water.

Incentives for proper field and crop management are also important, not only to manage water more effectively and efficiently on the farm, but also beyond. Pollution from excess fertilizer and chemicals degrades water, and careless cultivation and erosion can muddy it up. The US Environmental Protection Agency blames agriculture as the country's leading cause of water quality impairment. When agriculture loses excessive nitrate, phosphorous, pesticides, and mineral salts in the water, these pollutants may have a social and environmental cost.

Thus, unless the world's agricultural system rapidly adapts to improved practices and incentives such as those mentioned above, unless it develops and deploys new crops and implements more efficient technologies to improve water use efficiency and resilience to drought in agriculture, future levels of agricultural production won't keep up with the trends that await it.

Trends

Overall, about 70% of global freshwater withdrawals are currently used for agriculture (reaching up to 90% in some fast-growing economies). But inefficiencies in agricultural water use are generally extremely high. Traditional irrigation, in most water-scarce countries consumes only about half the water it withdraws; the rest is lost, leaks back to the land or simply evaporates.

Our human population is expected to expand from 6.38 to 8 billion over the next fifteen years.⁴ This growing population will contain a much larger and more urban middle class than today, who will demand more quantities and different types of foodstuff from world agriculture. To meet these new demands, a doubling of food production will likely be required in the next forty years. Consequently, total world cereal demand is projected to grow from 585 million tonnes today to 828 million tonnes by 2025. This is a rise of 42%. This means that in the next twenty years, farmers will need to increase production on aggregate by 70–100% and reduce postharvest loss. The speed and scale of these productivity improvements that will be demanded of the world's agriculture are unprecedented. Interestingly, more than 25% of the increase in grain demand will actually be due to changes in consumer diets (more grain for more livestock) rather than to population growth alone.⁵

The rise in demand for livestock has significant implications for the water-agriculture nexus. Meat, on average, requires about ten times the water per calorie than plants. As a result, the average daily diet in California requires some six thousand liters of water in agriculture, compared to three thousand liters in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt.⁶

Global demand for meat is expected to increase by 50% between now and 2025, doubling from 229 million tons in 1999–2001 to 465 million tons in 2050. While high proportions of meat in European and American diets have been the case for many years now, this trend is also catching on in emerging markets.⁷ In China, consumption of meat has increased from fewer than 20 grams per capita per day to 150 grams.⁸ This is still far behind the 350 to 400 grams consumed per capita per day in the US. Demand for dairy products from livestock will also grow, again increasing the pressure on agricultural water sources. Milk demand is expected to nearly double, from 580 million tons today to 1,043 million tons by 2025.⁹ Consequently, growth in the livestock sector will place upward pressure on agricultural water use, accounting for about 8% of total global human water use, mostly for the irrigation of feed crops. This is approximately the same as total human use of freshwater withdrawals for washing and domestic uses.¹⁰

Another recent upward pressure on water use in agriculture is the switch to growing feedstock as first-generation biofuels, often with generous government subsidies. To combat greenhouse gas emissions, countries around the world have set ambitious targets to replace a significant part of their fossil-fuel energy consumption with biofuels. For example, the European Union has set a target of a 20% blend of biofuel in the road transport mix by 2020. But the water intensity of biofuel feedstocks is of concern. While it can vary greatly depending on the feedstock used and where and how it is grown (irrigated biofuel crops, for example, are much more water-intensive than nonirrigated ones), the production of grain and oilseed crops grown for biofuels is more water-intensive than the production of petroleum (corn can take between 9,000 and 100,000 liters per gigajoule (GJ) of energy, soy 50,000–270,000 liters/GJ, whereas petroleum takes between 28 and 72 liters per GJ).¹¹ Sugarcane is generally not irrigated. It is also important to note that feedstocks that could be used for second-generation biofuel production, including grasses and crop wastes, are likely to use less water than today's feedstocks. But good information is not available on the water use per unit of energy for these crops, because they are not yet in commercial production. Nevertheless, since the energy market, measured in calories, is twenty times the size of the food market, replacing 5–6% of energy consumption by first-generation biofuels would risk doubling water withdrawals for agriculture. This clearly is an impossible trade-off, and it seems that many policy makers have not yet fully thought it through.

In many parts of the world, water withdrawals for agriculture are already greater than natural replenishment levels. In Yemen, parts of India, and northern China, water tables are falling by more than 1 meter per year. In Mexico, extraction rates in a quarter of the country's 459 aquifers exceed long-term recharge by more than 20%. One-tenth of India's grain is already watered by the unsustainable, overpumping aquifers. National groundwater overdrafts exceed 25% in China and 56% in India.¹²

As discussed, the development and deployment of new agricultural technologies will be critical to address the water challenge facing agriculture. But ironically, while more investment in agricultural technology and research is urgently required, until very recently international aid to improve agricultural productivity in developing countries has fallen. Official development assistance to agriculture fell one-third since the early 1990s, from 12% to 3.5%.¹³ Initiatives to revitalize the productivity of agriculture, such as those promoted by the Gates Foundation and others, are overdue and extremely welcome. To take forward the important findings of Water for Food, Water for Life, however, it will be critical for these initiatives to focus on the water-agriculture nexus in their work.

The other important trend with regard to the water-agriculture nexus is of course the impact that worsening water security has on global agricultural commodity markets and food prices. For 50 years or so, we have enjoyed st...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Agriculture
• Chapter 2 - Energy
• Chapter 3 - Trade
• Chapter 4 - National Security
• Chapter 5 - Cities
• Chapter 6 - People
• Chapter 7 - Business
• Chapter 8 - Finance
• Chapter 9 - Climate
• Chapter 10 - New Economic Frameworks for Decision-Making
• Chapter 11 - Innovative Water Partnerships
• Conclusions
• Acknowledgments