Virtual water trade flows and savings under climate change
By M. Konar, Zekarias Hussein, N. Hanasaki, D. Mauzerall, I. Rodríguez‐Iturbe. 2013
122 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The international trade of food commodities links water and food systems, with important implications for both water and food security. The embodied water resources asso- ciated with food trade are referred to as "virtual water trade". We present the first study of the impact of climate change on global virtual water trade flows and associated savings for the year 2030. In order to project virtual water trade and savings under climate change, it is essential to obtain projec- tions of both bilateral crop trade and the virtual water content of crops in each country of production. We use the Global Trade Analysis Project model to estimate bilateral crop trade under changes in agricultural productivity for rice, soy, and wheat. We use the H08 global hydrologic model to determine the impact of climatic changes to crop evapotranspiration for rice, soy, and wheat in each country of production. Then, we combine projections of bilateral crop trade with estimates of virtual water content to obtain virtual water trade flows un- der climate change. We find that the total volume of virtual water trade is likely to go down under climate change, due to decreased crop trade from higher crop prices under sce- narios of declining crop yields and due to decreased virtual water content under high agricultural productivity scenarios. However, the staple food trade is projected to save more wa- ter across most climate change scenarios, largely because the wheat trade re-organizes into a structure where large volumes of wheat are traded from relatively water-efficient exporters to less efficient importers.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bee1150aefa02506316df5bdeeee21422c6b01a1
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Environmental Engineering
In Ocean Engineering
In Water Science and Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Non-renewable groundwater use and groundwater depletion: a review (2019, background): “…of water use and allocation within river basins (Houk et al 2007, Pulido-Velazquez et al 2008), analysing the economywide effects of water scarcity (Konar et al 2013, Lenzen et al 2013), the role of non-renewable groundwater in food trade (Dalin et al 2017), the guidance of investments in water…”
- Socio‐hydrology: Use‐inspired water sustainability science for the Anthropocene (2014, unknown): “It is clear that in order to understand why trade saves water at the global scale, but not for certain regional and local trade links, it is essential to consider the social factors underlying agricultural production and trade [Konar et al., 2013].”
- PCR-GLOBWB 2: a 5 arcmin global hydrological and water resources model (2017, background): “More recently, the output from global hydrological models has been extended to study socioeconomic impacts, such as virtual water trade (Konar et al., 2013; Dalin et al., 2017) and future agricultural production (Elliott et al.”
- Moving sociohydrology forward: a synthesis across studies (2015, background): “For example, Konar et al. (2013) examined how changing spatial patterns of crop yield would affect the water footprint of trade in the coming decades, and O'Bannon et al. (2014) examined how agricultural trade concentrates water pollution in only a handful of countries.”