Water, food and energy nexus challenges
Comprehensive yet concise report outlining the key challenges and projected demands in the global agricultural sector, from an energy-water-food nexus perspective.
Comprehensive yet concise report outlining the key challenges and projected demands in the global agricultural sector, from an energy-water-food nexus perspective.
This report cautions against an overly rigid approach to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which it argues could limit development options for poor countries, particularly in how they are able to manage critical water resources. It identifies key challenges such as setting realistic targets, carefully considering the local context to address the needs of the poor, and promoting sustainable water resources development in a way that values healthy ecosystems.
A história da agricultura mundial no último meio século tem sido, sobretudo, a história de transformações produtivas, impulsionadas pela ciência e pela intensificação tecnológica, e a resultante expansão da capacidade produtiva, pari passu com o crescimento da demanda de alimentos.
International Water Management Institute (IWMI).
Constrained access to land is increasingly recognized as a problem impeding rural household welfare in densely populated areas of Africa. This study utilizes household and plot level data from rural Kenya to explore the linkage between land access and food security. We find that a 10% increase in operated land size would increase total cereal consumption and home produced food consumption by 0.8% and 2.0%, respectively. We also find that land rental is the dominant mechanism that poor rural farmers use to access additional land for cultivation.
This paper presents results from comprehensive field surveys of jatropha projects in Mozambique, Tanzania and Mali in 2012. The article singles out the salient economic and social impact results and derives lessons. The results clearly demonstrate the weak business case for jatropha biofuel production at this time.
Biofuel plantations have been hyped as a means to reinvigorate Africa’s rural areas. Yet there is still apprehension about the negative environmental and social impacts of large-scale commercial biofuel production around rising food prices, land grabbing, ecological damage, and disruption of rural livelihoods.
The widespread acquisition of land for large-scale/commercial production of biofuel crops in Ghana has raised concerns from civil society organizations, local communities and other parties, regarding the impact of these investments on local livelihoods. This paper assessed the effect of large-scale acquisition of land for production of Jatropha curcas on farmers’ livelihoods in Ghana. The study was conducted in 11 communities spanning the major agro-ecological zones and political divisions across Ghana.
This study focuses on analyzing the ongoing land policy reform that allows collective-owned rural land transactions in the open market in Shenzhen, China. Employing a case study method, we investigate this land policy evolution through description and contextual analysis. We argue that the existing dual-track land administration system, within which the state administers market transactions, has contributed to numerous social problems, such as urban land scarcity, inefficiency of land resource allocation, and exacerbated social injustice.
In urban America, land development and residential real estate have passed through a number of different phases during the post-WWII era. In contemporary discourse on urban sustainability, attention is often expressed in terms of intensity of land development, lot sizes, and square-footage of housing units. In this paper, we reconstruct the land development trajectory of a rapidly growing southern city in the United States and assess whether this trajectory has experienced any reversal in the face of socio-economic transformations that have occurred over the past decade or so.