|
|
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 09 June 2011
Climate change will have major impacts on the availability of water for growing food and on crop productivity in the decades to come, warns a new FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] report.
 Loss of glaciers will eventually impact the amount of surface water available for agriculture ‘Climate Change, Water, and Food Security’ is a comprehensive survey of existing scientific knowledge on the anticipated consequences of climate change for water use in agriculture.
These include reductions in river runoff and aquifer recharges in the Mediterranean and the semi-arid areas of the Americas, Australia and southern Africa — regions that are already water-stressed. In Asia, large areas of irrigated land that rely on snowmelt and mountain glaciers for water will also be affected, while heavily populated river deltas are at risk from a combination of reduced water flows, increased salinity, and rising sea levels.
Additional impacts described in the report:
An acceleration of the world’s hydrological cycle is anticipated as rising temperatures increase the rate of evaporation from land and sea. Rainfall will increase in the tropics and higher latitudes, but decrease in already dry semi-arid to mid-arid latitudes and in the interior of large continents. A greater frequency in droughts and floods will need to be planned for but already, water scarce areas of the world are expected to become drier and hotter.
Even though estimates of groundwater recharge under climate change cannot be made with any certainty, the increasing frequency of drought can be expected to encourage further development of available groundwater to buffer the production risk for farmers. Continue reading Water warning for agriculture
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 04 June 2011
China warned several central and southern provinces hit by a months-long dry spell on Saturday to prepare for heavy rain and even floods, which would help to ease a drought which has damaged crops [...]
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 31 May 2011
Oxfam called on Tuesday for an overhaul of the world’s food system, warning that in a couple of decades, millions more people would be gripped by hunger due to population growth and climate-hit harvests.
 The price of staple foods will more than double in the next 20 years A “broken food system” means that the price of some staples will more than double by 2030, battering the world’s poorest people, who spend up to 80% of their income on food, the British-based aid group predicted.
“The food system is buckling under intense pressure from climate change, ecological degradation, population growth, rising energy prices, rising demand for meat and dairy products and competition for land from biofuels, industry, and urbanisation,” Oxfam said in a report.
“The international community is sleepwalking into an unprecedented and avoidable human development reversal,” it added.
Noting that some 900 million people experience hunger today, Oxfam said the tally of misery could rise still further when a “perfect storm” struck a few decades from now. Continue reading World food supply warning
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 12 April 2011
Farming is moving indoors, where the sun never shines, where rainfall is irrelevant and where the climate is always right.
 Indoor rice field in Tokyo. The perfect crop field could be inside a windowless building with meticulously controlled light, temperature, humidity, air quality and nutrition. It could be in a New York high-rise, a Siberian bunker or a sprawling complex in the Saudi desert.
Advocates say this, or something like it, may be the answer to the world’s food problems.
“In order to keep a planet that’s worth living on, we have to change our methods,” says Gertjan Meeuws of PlantLab, a private research company.
The world is already having trouble feeding itself. Half the people on earth live in cities, and nearly half of those – about 3 billion – are hungry or malnourished.
Food prices, currently soaring, are buffeted by droughts, floods and the cost of energy required to plant, fertilise, harvest and transport produce.
And prices will only get more unstable. Climate change makes long-term crop planning uncertain.
Farmers in many parts of the world already are draining available water resources to the last drop.
And the world is getting more crowded: by mid-century, the global population will grow from 6.8 billion to 9 billion, the UN predicts.
To feed so many people may require expanding farmland at the expense of forests and wilderness, or finding ways to radically increase crop yields. Continue reading Indoor farming may solve world food problem
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 21 March 2011
By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in regions with absolute water scarcity and two-thirds of the world’s population may experience water-stress conditions. Forests capture and store water and can play an important role in providing drinking water for millions of people in the world’s mega-cities. Given this fact, the members of the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF), international organizations involved in forests, call upon countries to pay more attention to forest protection and management for the provision of clean water.
 One third of the world's biggest cities draw a portion of their drinking-water from forested areas. “Forests are part of the natural infrastructure of any country and are essential to the water cycle”, said Eduardo Rojas-Briales, Assistant Director General of the FAO Forestry Department.
“They reduce the effects of floods, prevent soil erosion, regulate the water table and assure a high quality water supply for people, industry and agriculture.” He was speaking prior to the UN World Water Day which will be celebrated this year on 22 March.
Forests are in most cases an optimal land cover for catchments supplying drinking water. Forest watersheds supply a high proportion of water for domestic, agricultural, industrial and ecological needs.
“The management of water and forests are closely linked and require innovative policy solutions which take into account the cross-cutting nature of these vital resources”, said Jan McAlpine, Director of the United Nations Forum on Forests Secretariat. “The International Year of Forests, 2011 provides a unique platform to raise awareness of issues such as the water-soil-forests nexus, which directly affect the quality of people’s lives, their livelihoods and their food security.”
Moreover, forests and trees contribute to the reduction of water-related risks such as landslides, local floods and droughts and help prevent desertification and salinization. Continue reading Forests are essential to water cycle
|
Water Rhapsody
is a
WWF Green Trust
award winner.
Save up to 90% of your municipal water bill.
|
