Can ‘nexus thinking’ alleviate global water, food and energy pressures?

With demand for the world’s three most precious resources only set to grow, a new approach must be put into action

Agriculture accounts for 70% of freshwater consumption worldwide. Photograph: National Geographic Image Collec/Alamy

With the world population growing at a rate of around 80 million people a year, it is estimated that by 2030 the world will need 30% more water, 40% more energy and 50% more food. That’s not just to feed, water and power the new arrivals, but also those currently living “off grid” in developing countries as they rise out of poverty.

In the past, water, food and energy have too often been dealt with as separate issues. Biofuels are a classic example. Once the great hope for sustainable energy, bio-diesel’s insatiable appetite for wheat saw global food prices spike in 2008 and 2011, causing civil unrest. Panicked into action, the international community spoke out at the German government’s Bonn 2011 conference and the water-food-energy nexus.

What is nexus thinking?

The nexus is a recognition that any solution for one problem, for example water, must equally consider the other two in the nexus. Jeff Erikson, senior vice president at environmental consultancy SustainAbility, explains: “Water is required all the way through the lifecycle of electricity and power generation, from fuel extraction to production; electricity is required to move and process water, while agriculture accounts for 70% of the freshwater consumption worldwide. One is dependent on the other, and the demand for all three is going to continue to grow.

“Then you put climate change on top of that, which is going to have a significant impact on both agriculture and water availability, and you can see how things will continue to get squeezed over the next number of decades.”

From the World Economic Forum in Davos, Jon Williams, partner, sustainability and climate change at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), says unsustainable resource consumption can only get worse without the nexus. “Water is pretty much used for everything that we do and is already becoming scarce in large parts of the world; the more energy we use, the more water we need to cool power stations … [And] If the whole world ate like Europeans or Americans there would be no way there would be sufficient food, let alone the water to grow it. The three competing pressures [water, food, energy are] pulling in completely the wrong direction at the moment.”

China as a case study

China is an interesting case study. Professor Declan Conway of the UEA Water Security Research Centre has extensively researched water and energy use in the world’s most populous country: “Many of the pressures we’re talking about globally are all occurring within China,” Conway says.

“It is the world’s second largest irrigator, using a huge quantity of water for growing of crops, much of which is pumped from underground – and that requires a lot of energy. We recently found that 0.5% of China’s total emissions come simply from the pumping of groundwater for irrigation.”

Potential responses to these issues are still in their infancy, but China’s next five year plan includes planning goals for energy efficiency and emissions, food production and water use, including “how much water goes into growing a particular crop,” says Conway. “A lot of effort has gone into softening the blow on agriculture while incentivising much more efficient use of water.”

But these are not strident solutions. China is currently pumping water out of the ground at a rate of 20 cubic kilometres per year faster than nature can replenish. Worse still is the US at 30 cubic kilometres, and India at 190 cubic kilometres.

Policy has yet to catch up with the rhetoric of international conferences, argues Jeremy Allouche, research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. “The problem with the nexus at the moment is it hasn’t led to any policy concepts … and it hasn’t led to key players taking it forward,” he says.

Aligning policy with action

There is a perverse positive: our current usage of water, food and energy is so outrageously inefficient that improvements are not hard to find. “The sad fact is that anywhere between 10-15% of the food we produce ends up in waste,” says Williams, who in part blames agricultural subsidies. “It’s quite scandalous that a society produces more food than it can actually reasonably eat. Equally, he continues, “if you look at individual buildings there are examples of 25-75% reductions in energy use by simply insulating.”

When domestic and industrial use of freshwater only account for 8% and 22% accordingly, compared to 70% by agriculture, it may seem that individuals and business are relatively powerless. However, not according to the nexus. “The energy associated with other uses of water can be quite high”, says Conway.

“The need to pump and deliver water and to treat it to drinking water standards, can be far higher than the energy requirements associated with agriculture. So although the volumes are different, the energy use can be much higher per unit of water.”

Meanwhile, biofuels may be set to make a comeback. Jesper Hedal Kløverpris is sustainability manager at Danish biotech company Novozymes, producer of the enzymes needed to make cellulosic ethanol. “What’s interesting in relation to the food-water nexus is we make cellulosic ethanol simply by taking the residues – or waste – from the existing agricultural system,” says Kløverpris. “It has a big potential for producing energy without additional agricultural water use.”

In theory, while ears of corn are harvested for food – and previously for bio-ethanol – only waste stems are needed by bioethanol refineries, hungry for the cellulose and hemicellulose normally discarded, rather than the starch and protein. Large bioethanol refineries have already appeared in Italy, Brazil, the US and China. Research by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that by 2030, this has the potential to replace more than 50% of gasoline consumption in some countries. “That gives an indication of the potential”, says Kløverpris. And as for the water intensity of bio-refineries and the greenhouse gases emitted by the process, he admits the “science is still progressing”, but cites recent studies that have found in favour of cellulosic ethanol versus gasoline.

One thing the nexus highlights is that an awful lot needs to be done in the next two decades and an awful lot faster than it currently is happening.

“We are profiling the need to make these linkages much more than we were”, says Conway. “Whether we are making a lot of progress in actually getting there and making those linkages, I’m less sure … We’re still on a trajectory of rapid change that has huge implications for consumption patterns, energy use, the land needed to provide crops.”

It’s time for nexus thinking to make way for nexus action.

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

original source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/nexus-thinking-global-water-food-energy/print

Water, food and energy: the trilemma facing the 21st century

Felix von Geyer, freelance sustainable development journalist

The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning in November’s World Energy Outlook that water demand would outstrip energy demand two-fold highlighted the scale of water-energy nexus.

The reality is more complex.

“Energy, food and water is the trilemma facing the twenty-first century,” Dr Anne Kerr, Regional Director for Asia with engineering consultant Mott MacDonald, told a break-out session at last February’s KPMG’s Rio+20 Business Summit.

Traditional water-energy nexus thinking highlights the mutual importance of water and conventional energy. Energy is fundamental to collect, transport, distribute and treat water. Water is essential to extract, process and refine fossil fuels.

In the US, half of water withdrawals are for energy, including cooling nuclear and thermal power plants that also contribute thermal pollution by returning hot water to waterways, causing blue-green algal bloom.

The onset of climate change further exacerbates the interconnectivity of the energy-water nexus. Water shortages have the potential to cause power shutdowns – most famously in France during the hot summer of 2003 where nuclear plants were closed as river levels were too low to cool the plants – and droughts in US, China and India can cripple hydro-electricity output.

Water scarcity limits exploitation of China’s shale gas reserves and, in the US, constrains development of the Bakken oil and gas formation – currently providing independence from foreign oil imports.

Critically, a global population expansion to 9 billion people by 2050, coupled with increased economic growth, will intensify competition for water, as well as increasing the need for food and energy, creating a trilemma for 21st century society to resolve.

The Water Resource Group’s 2009 report ‘Charting our Water Future’ predicted a global water gap of 40% between demand and accessible water by 2030 and that water consumption is set to rise from 4,500 billion cubic metres to 6,900 billion cubic metres with no change to business as usual practices and policies, such as improved ‘crop per drop’ irrigation and rain-fed measures.

Agriculture accounts for 71% of current total global water withdrawals. A 50% population increase will exponentially increase agricultural output, requiring more water and energy through fertilisers, harvesting and processing. India could double water consumption through to 2030 to 1.5 trillion cubic metres, leaving the country with a 50% water gap.

Anticipating any substantially positive impact of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in developing plants that combine higher energy content with reduced water consumption is difficult.

This water gap presents the opportunity for water-rich countries, such as Canada, to address how to maximise its freshwater resources to provide ‘virtual’ water through intensive products and commodities to water scarce countries, according to Bob Sandford, Chairman of the UN’s Water for Life Decade.

Current energy trends exacerbate the trilemma. Average global temperature increases of 3.6°C are likely, warned the IEA. The current global energy infrastructure will contribute 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions necessary to reach a 2°C warming, the threshold of serious climate change predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And the US Third National Climate Assessment released this January suggested extreme scenarios could lead to a temperature increase of more than 5°C by the end of the century, causing cataclysmic climate change by IPCC projections.

Moving from this current energy trend is problematic. Fossil fuels are projected to comprise 80% of global energy demand to 2035 with current policies. A shifting of fossil fuel subsidies to renewable energy subsidies could see renewable energy supply over 60% of demand, say the IEA.

From a water perspective, this energy shift could be advantageous. Energy’s water dependency accounted for 15% – 583 billion cubic metres – of global water withdrawals in 2010. While only 66 billion cubic metres are not returned to source, energy-related water withdrawals are anticipated to increase by 20% by 2035, with a dramatic 85% increase in consumption. The rate of water not returned to source would almost double to 120 billion cubic metres.

In contrast, the use of renewable energies to 2035 is predicted to increase water consumption by only 4% although some technologies – such as concentrated solar power, which generates steam to drive turbines, as is the case in the proposed Desertec project – would be more water intensive than others. Tackling climate change through measures such as carbon capture storage could also prove to be water intensive.

But energy is vital to humanity and development. Worldwide 1.3 billion people have no access to electricity, while 2.6 billion people use traditional biomass for cooking.

Does the world need to rely on fossil-fuels to bridge this energy gap?

Jacobson and Delucchi’s study in the March 2011 edition of Energy Policy suggested wind, water and sunlight (WWS) can provide all new energy to 2030 and replace pre-existing energy sources by 2050.

Society, industry, governments and investors have to wake up to the reality surrounding food, energy and water – and fast. There are alternatives to fossil fuels but there are no alternatives to food, or freshwater.

original source: http://www.stakeholderforum.org/sf/outreach/index.php/component/content/article/170-irena-wrap-up/1386-water-food-and-energy-the-trilemma-facing-the-21st-century

Aquatic agriculture offers a new solution to the problem of water scarcity

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/jan/05/marine-agriculture-solution-water-scarcity

January 2013

Hunger and nutrition will feature prominently at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland in June, in keeping with the renewed interest in agriculture, especially in Africa, where investors are eyeing the potential of vast tracts of land.

But as experts note, water is the most severe impediment to increasing food production and security.

Ricardo Radulovich, professor of water science at the University of Costa Rica, points out that in Africa irrigation is a very limited option, due to lack of water, and rain-fed agriculture is affected by prolonged dry seasons and rainfall variability during the rainy seasons. A case in point is the Sahel in west Africa, where drought has grown increasingly frequent and where emergency aid was needed last year to forestall famine.

Yet Radulovich believes that Africa’s lakes can be part of the solution to the continent’s agricultural limitations. Several African countries are endowed with lakes, some very large, that occupy a surface of more than 150,000 square kilometres. Why not use that water surface to grow food and aquatic plants, and for fisheries, asks Radulovich, who began his career as an agricultural water scientist 10 years ago.

“The key issue is water,” Radulovich said in a telephone interview from Costa Rica. “We have land, but water is the limiting element. You can have agriculture if you have water. If we use that lake surface to produce crops, aquatic plants, we won’t waste water.”

Radulovich and his team, including Schery Umanzor, have already begun prototype projects on Lake Nicaragua, where they have grown lettuce, tomato, cucumber and cantaloupe melons on floating rafts, a continuation of trials that were undertaken at sea in 2001 at the Gulf of Nicoya, on the Pacific coast. The tomato roots can trail in the water or be potted with a cotton rope dangling in the water from the pot, which draws in water to the plant.

The size of the rafts can vary, going up to six square metres, and can be made simply and cheaply, from plastic bottles, for example. Where the water is polluted by horticulture, an option is to grow flowers. One advantage of growing crops on water is that they are not as vulnerable to insects as they would be on land.

The team’s pioneering techniques have earned them a $100,000 (£62,000) grant from Grand Challenges Canada, which is funded by the Canadian government. Targeting innovations for developing countries, Grand Challenges Canada will provide additional funding of $1m for those ideas that prove effective.

Radulovich and his colleagues also see potential in aquatic plants such as azolla, water hyacinth and alligator weed. Frequently dismissed as weeds that clutter waterways, such plants are seen by Radulovich as enriching biodiversity, and as a source of nutrients and habitat for small fish and snails that attract bigger fish. He believes that hyacinth, for example, can be used as feed for herbivorous fish such as Chinese carp, animals and even humans, in the form of flour.

“Currently, where their blooms are a nuisance and clutter waterways, the new trend is to harvest and use them,” Radulovich says. “The next trend must be: cultivate them. All of this without even beginning selection and genetic improvement programmes, which in a few years, with a fraction of what is spent in agricultural improvement, can lead to tremendous advances.”

Radulovich is particularly excited at the possibility of growing rice by attaching rice plants to ropes. “Even if the water is low in oxygen, maybe you can produce three rice crops a year, but whether we can do it economically I don’t know,” he says.

Several countries have expressed interest in the concept of marine agriculture, including Uganda, Ethiopia, the Philippines and Malawi. But Radulovich sees the technological problems as only the start of the challenge, with cultural change, including food habits, posing greater hurdles.

“If people need it, and they do, the water environment must be used intelligently, and even changed, to an extent, without biological or environmental chaos.”

Grabbing at Solutions: Water for the Hungry First

http://www.postcarbon.org/article/1356496-grabbing-at-solutions-water-for-the

Dec 18, 2012

A spontaneous, largely under-the-radar blue revolution is gaining steam in sub-Saharan Africa and has the potential to boost food security and incomes for tens of millions of the region’s poorest inhabitants.

Small-scale irrigation techniques with simple buckets, affordable pumps, drip lines, and other equipment are enabling farm families to weather dry seasons, raise yields, diversify their crops, and lift themselves out of poverty.

But unless African governments and foreign interests lend support to these farmer-driven initiatives, rather than undermine them through land and water deals that benefit large-scale, commercial schemes, the best opportunity in decades for societal advancement in the region will be squandered.

Worldwide, as the limits of available water become ever more apparent, the rush is on to acquire more of the precious liquid before there’s none to be had.  Government and business interests from China, India, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and other countries that have depleted many of their own water sources are now acquiring access to the land and water of other nations – especially poor ones – to rake in profits and secure food supplies.

The 2008 spike in global food prices unleashed a frenzy of land and water deals that threaten not only the livelihoods of millions but also the geopolitical security of nations.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Africa, especially poor countries south of the Sahara.  Business and government interests are targeting Ethiopia, Mali, Sudan, and other underdeveloped nations to capitalize on their “underutilized” farmlands and waters.

Although pitched as investments to advance economic development, many of these deals are not only failing to deliver promised benefits, they are destroying the livelihoods of traditional farmers, herders, and fisherfolk.

Today, hunger is endemic in sub-Saharan Africa.  The 2012 Global Hunger Index ranks forty-two of the forty-five countries in the region for which data are available at “serious” or “alarming” levels.  Nearly one in four children are underweight.

But most sub-Saharan African countries have barely begun to reach their food production potential.  According to a 2010 World Bank report, farms in Sudan have achieved only a tenth of their potential yield; those in Ethiopia, only 23 percent.

Closing this yield gap is precisely where the greatest opportunities lie in meeting future food needs.  The International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka, estimates that three quarters of the world’s additional food needs in 2050 could be met by increasing harvests on low-yielding farms, including those in sub-Saharan Africa, to 80 percent of what high-yielding farms achieve on comparable land.

And that is where the new blue revolution in small-farm irrigation comes in.

Affordable Farm Technology

A suite of affordable pumps, drip systems, and other technologies are enabling poor farmers to access and deliver irrigation water to their small plots of land.  Once small farmers have reliable water supplies, they can confidently invest in better seeds, fertilizers, and other yield-raising inputs.  They can also plant higher-value crops to take to market.

The outcome can be transformative.

The non-profit KickStart, for example, markets a line of manual pumps called the MoneyMaker in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, and Tanzania.  With access to irrigation water, farm families reap bigger harvests, greater food security, and more income.  KickStart estimates that its MoneyMaker products have helped lift 667,000 people out of poverty and created 133,000 new businesses.

With the arrival of inexpensive motorized pumps costing around $250 apiece, many farmers are turning to this laborsaving device to access water.  About 30 percent of small-scale irrigators in Ghana, for instance, now lease or own a motor pump, a vast improvement over the simple water-lifting buckets used by the remaining 70 percent.

A three-year study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation estimates that small, motorized pumps in sub-Saharan Africa could expand irrigation by some 30 million hectares, boost food security and incomes for 185 million people, and generate net revenues of $22 billion per year.

Governments and development organizations can help strengthen this farmer-driven movement by extending financial and institutional support.  In northern Nigeria, a project begun with a $67 million World Bank loan and initially spanning 50,000 hectares (123,550 acres), is enabling farmers to tap shallow groundwater with low-cost wells and motorized pumps.  Yields of rice and maize, basic staples in the region, have risen markedly, as have yields of marketable crops like onions, peppers, and tomatoes.  With their extra income, farm families have improved their homes, sent their children to school, and purchased more goods – adding jobs and money to the local economy.

Now in its third phase of expansion, this Fadama project (fadama is a Hausa term for irrigable land) has formed 12,000 stakeholder groups representing some 6.3 million households in some dozen Nigerian states.

Such development from the bottom up holds much greater promise of reducing hunger and poverty than land deals that promote crops for export or that expropriate land and water from local people.

Getting More out of Rainfall

More then 95 percent of cropland in sub-Saharan Africa is watered only by rain, so while expanding irrigation is crucial, so is making more effective use of rainwater.  On many farms, only 15 to 30 percent of rainfall gets used productively by crops.  The remainder evaporates, percolates below the root zone, or simply runs off the field.

So-called conservation farming techniques that retain rainwater in soils can greatly improve productivity on small farms.  These include mulching, terracing, planting vegetative barriers to keep soil and water in place, and constructing small earthen dams or other structures to harvest and store rainwater for supplemental irrigation.

Work by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and others on experimental farms in Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, and Tanzania has shown that such conservation farming practices can increase yields of maize by 20 to 120 percent and of tef (a staple of the Ethiopian diet used in the spongy bread injera) by 35 to 100 percent.

Many of these conservation methods require a great deal of labor, however, so they remain under used.  Constructing one hectare (2.5 acres) of rock embankments, for example, can take one person nearly 100 days. Farmers need a high rate of return to justify such an investment of time.

Development organizations could help spread the adoption of these methods by underwriting early returns, enabling more farmers to incur the short-term opportunity costs required to reap the longer-term benefits.

Addressing Water Use at Home

Besides re-focusing their agricultural investments abroad, richer countries can take some important actions at home – including improving their own water-use practices.

Getting more nutrition per drop can stretch domestic water supplies and reduce the need to seek land, water, and food from other nations. Drip irrigation, which delivers water directly to the roots of plants at very low volumes, can cut water use by up to 70 percent compared with old-style flood or furrow irrigation, while increasing crop yields by 20 to 90 percent.  Although the method has expanded rapidly in recent years, it still accounts for only about 3 percent of irrigated land in China and India, the world’s top two irrigators, and about 7 percent in the United States.

Slowing the depletion of groundwater reserves is also crucial.  Pumping from the aquifers of the upper Ganges in India and Pakistan produces the world’s biggest groundwater footprint by far, followed by the aquifers of Saudi Arabia, Iran, western Mexico, the U.S. High Plains, and the north China plain.

Globally, ten percent of our food supply now depends on the unsustainable use of groundwater.  In effect we’re robbing the Peters of the future to feed the Pauls of today.

Monitoring and placing limits on groundwater pumping would slow the depletion, drive up water efficiency, and save more water for future generations.  After the Texas legislature capped pumping from the Edwards Aquifer two decades ago, irrigation efficiency rose, an active water market developed, and the city of San Antonio cut its per capita water use by 43%.

The United States and other countries could also help by re-framing their policies toward biofuels.  Corn ethanol and biodiesel are water-intensive energy sources, so mandates to add more biofuels to the energy mix can hasten the draining of water supplies.  A number of the big African land deals reported by the Spain-based non-profit GRAIN are geared toward the commercial production of biofuel crops, including palm oil in Cameroon’s high-value tropical forest and jatropha in Kenya’s Tana River Delta, one of Africa’s most valuable wetlands.

Geopolitical Stability

Slowing the rush to grab land and water in sub-Saharan Africa is also a matter of regional and global geopolitical security.

Tensions over the Nile River, for example, could rise substantially due to recent foreign land deals.  GRAIN has identified some 4.9 million hectares of land leased out to foreign entities in Sudan and South Sudan since 2006 – 75 percent more area than the two countries’ combined irrigation potential.  Ethiopia, the source of 84 percent of the Nile’s flow, has also leased out 3.6 million hectares, including lands in the Nile Basin’s Gambela region.

If even a portion of the lands leased in these three countries is brought into production with Nile water, flows into Egypt – which depends completely on the Nile – would drop dramatically.  Besides threatening food security in all three nations, the Nile water grabs could destabilize the entire region.

Unless governments and the international community stem the sell-off of sub-Saharan Africa’s natural assets and dedicate themselves to agricultural development that benefits the poor and hungry, economic advancement and political stability in much of the region will remain elusive.

Aral Sea Reborn

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/earthrise/2012/07/201271912543306106.html

21 Jul 2012

The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth largest lake – a rich haven for fish, birds and other wildlife. It was also home to bustling fishing ports such as Aralsk, which was once at the heart of the fishing industry in Kazakhstan.

But starting in the 1960s, massive agricultural expansion in the Aral region saw much of the water from the two rivers that feed the lake diverted into thousands of canals, to irrigate crops.  This caused the Aral Sea to shrink by 70 per cent and split into two – known as the North Aral and the South Aral, and leaving ports like Aralsk high and dry, many miles from the sea. This must surely count as one of mankind’s greatest environmental blunders.

But the North Aral is now being revived. The World Bank and the Kazakh government are spending millions of dollars to re-fill it and help revive its ecosystems. The first step is to make sure water from one of the region’s main rivers is more evenly split between agriculture and the sea.

Several hundred kilometres up stream from the North Aral, on the Syr Darya river is the Aitek Wier. The river used to be partly blocked here so that water could flow into irrigation canals. But the weir is more efficient than the previous dam and allows much more water to flow into the sea. When the river water reaches the sea, the 13-kilometre-long Kok-Aral dam allows it to collect and build up.

As a result, the surface of the North Aral is now 50 per cent larger than it was at its lowest point. The dam does, however, effectively cut off the water supply to the larger South Aral, which continues to shrink. But most people agree it is the lesser of two evils because without this dam neither North nor the South Aral could survive.

When the sea shrank it became very salty, causing all of the freshwater fish species to disappear. But the increase of freshwater means that the Aral’s ecology is making a comeback. Many of the fish species are now returning from the rivers where they took refuge. But they still need a helping hand.

In the village of Tastak a fishery is breeding five types of fish, including native carp and sturgeon, for re-introduction into the lake. The fish hatchery also boosts fish numbers by giving the breeding fish a hormone to stimulate egg production. As a result one fish can produce around 250,000 larvae, and this summer the fishery hopes to release four million juveniles into the North Aral.

The return of the fish has also meant the return of the fishermen. Since 2007 the annual catch in the North Aral has doubled.

But there are still problems here – fishing restrictions are often flouted and the earthrise team found later that even the fishermen who took part in the filming were using cheap, non-regulation nets.

Serik Duisenbayev, from Aral Tenizi, a fishermen’s NGO, says that the lesson from the near-destruction of the Aral is that we must “…keep the balance between nature and humans beings. I think not only people of Aralsk and Kazakhstan. I think it should be a good lesson for the whole world now”.