Here, we address what we believe to be the critical obstacle to accomplishing the sustainable development goals that will frame the global agenda in the coming decades: ensuring that global food security is equitably achieved for a much larger projected population, without causing a cascade of negative impacts on the water, energy, climate, land and environmental systems needed to support food production.
The global challenge is to confront these systemic threats through resilient, sustainable, risk-based decision-making that responds to uncertainties and creates options to sustainably feed the world (WEF 2015). A growing awareness of the capacity for adverse shocks to proliferate through linked systems, or ‘systemic risks’ (De Bandt & Hartmann 2000), has coincided with a focus on resource security and risk-based principles for decision-making under uncertainty (Hall et al. The vulnerability of key food, energy and water systems to the current trajectory of resource use trends has been called the ‘perfect storm’ (Beddington 2009).
We must also consider risk more explicitly when evaluating policies and investments, given the likelihood of spatial and seasonal changes in temperature and rainfall, due to climate change, and the potential impacts on crop, livestock and fish production. We argue that the policy and management of complex food production systems must be reconsidered, particularly in relation to how critical inputs such as land, water, energy and nutrients are used. 1997).Įvidence suggests that past environmental degradation has weakened the resilience of agro-ecological systems (World Bank 2013) and may also have contributed to a slowing in the rate of crop yield growth since the 1980s (Barrett 2010 FAO et al. The unintended legacy of this period of agricultural and economic development has been a loss of biodiversity and forests, deterioration of soil, water and air quality, closed river basins, deforestation and desertification (Grafton et al. The intensification of food production since the 1960s has been a great success in reducing global hunger (Evenson & Gollin 2003), but the methods and policies driving success frequently lacked incentives for prudent use of inputs (Pingali 2012). To meet the global food security challenge to 2050, we cannot simply rely on the methods used to triple food production over the past 50 years. Such rising demands would occur in a world where agriculture already accounts for some 70 per cent of surface and groundwater withdrawals (AQUASTAT 2015) and roughly a third of the planet's land surface area (Foley et al. Without a fundamental shift in production processes, a projected 55 per cent more water (WWAP 2014) and 40 per cent more energy (IEA 2014) would be required to support future food demands (UNDESA 2013). Not only will food production need to increase by at least 50 per cent (FAO 2014) but also, on current trends, a similar upward trajectory is foreseen for essential inputs to the food system. Sustainably feeding more than 9 billion people in 2050 is arguably the largest global challenge over the next 35 years (Grafton et al.
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