Improvements in crop water productivity increase water sustainability and food security—a global analysis
By K. Brauman, Stefan Siebert, J. Foley. 2013
257 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Irrigation consumes more water than any other human activity, and thus the challenges of water sustainability and food security are closely linked. To evaluate how water resources are used for food production, we examined global patterns of water productivity—food produced (kcal) per unit of water (l) consumed. We document considerable variability in crop water productivity globally, not only across different climatic zones but also within climatic zones. The least water productive systems are disproportionate freshwater consumers. On precipitation-limited croplands, we found that ∼40% of water consumption goes to production of just 20% of food calories. Because in many cases crop water productivity is well below optimal levels, in many cases farmers have substantial opportunities to improve water productivity. To demonstrate the potential impact of management interventions, we calculated that raising crop water productivity in precipitation-limited regions to the 20th percentile of productivity would increase annual production on rainfed cropland by enough to provide food for an estimated 110 million people, and water consumption on irrigated cropland would be reduced enough to meet the annual domestic water demands of nearly 1.4 billion people.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0cd046f87da7d01a3aec96320bb38aea456403ed
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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
In Ocean Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Rethinking Agricultural Trade Relationships in an Era of Globalization (2015, background): “Countries that require irrigation because of dry climates may offset the need to irrigate by importing crops grown without the need for irrigation abroad (Dalin et al. 2012, Brauman et al. 2013).”