Showing posts with label resource scarcity. Show all posts

Written by fatih al-farahat in , ,


The Guardian: Growing pressure on water supplies affecting one in five global businesses


Growing pressure on water supplies affecting one in five global businesses

Survey reveals drought, shortages, flooding and rising prices are damaging companies in water-intensive industries

Bluetongue brewery in Australia, SABMiller
The Bluetongue brewery in Australia. Companies most at risk are in the food and drink, tobacco, and metals and mining sectors, says the report. Photograph: SABMiller

At least one in five of the companies using the largest amounts of waterin the world is already experiencing damage to their business fromdrought and other shortages, flooding, and rising prices.
The wide scope of commercial problems posed by growing pressure on global water supplies and changing weather patterns is revealed by a survey of the 302 biggest companies in the most water-intensive sectors, across 25 countries.
The study was commissioned by the increasingly influential Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which conducts an annual study of what companies are doing to measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions on behalf of investors holding US$16trillion (£9.9tr) of assets.
About half the companies responded to the water survey, of whom 39% said they were already experiencing "detrimental impacts". In answer to a separate question, about half said the risks to their businesses were "current or near term" - in the next one to five years - a sample likely to have significant crossover with those already reporting problems.
Companies most at risk are in the food and drink, tobacco, and metals and mining sectors, says the first CDP Water Disclosure report. Other concerns listed were fines and litigation for pollution.
Marcus Norton, who headed the report, said companies that replied to the survey were more likely to have taken action to address water issues affecting their business, but he was still "impressed" by the replies: 96% were aware of potential problems, and two-thirds have somebody responsible for water issues at board or executive committee level.
Of the companies which did not reply, not all would be ignoring the problems, but Norton hoped in following years more companies would show they take the issue "seriously".
"I don't think this is an issue of the price of water increasing even 10-fold, which I think in many cases it will," he added. "For me it's about building resilience to and avoiding catastrophic damage from water scarcity and physical risks. If you run out of water you can't operate. We have seen floods in China and Pakistan cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage."
Companies that ignore water dangers "pose a risk to investments", said Anne Kvam, head of corporate governance of Norges Bank Investment Management, a lead sponsor of the report.
The report, written by London-based consultancy Environmental Resource Management, names six companies showing "best practice" as mining giant Anglo American, consumer group Colgate-Palmolive, auto maker Ford, US utility PG&E, and engineers GE and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. This was not intended to suggest the named corporations were the top six, only that subjectively they were "good examples", said Norton.
A major report, Charting Our Water Future, commissioned by Nestlé and brewer SAB Miller among others last year, calculated by 2030 global water demand would outstrip supply by 40%, with shortages in some parts of the world much more severe than others, but also claimed existing management and technology could cut water use and boost supply enough to close the gap.
Nestlé chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, previously warned water is a greater threat than climate change, and called for significant rises in water prices to pressure big users to be more efficient.

Link:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/12/water-supplies-global-businesses

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Australian NSW farmers have called for all new mining and coal seam gas developments in NSW to be suspended until there is a strategic plan which protects food security and agricultural land


Farmers demand halt to all new mining


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by Debra Jopson, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 27, 2010
In Australia, New South Wales farmers have called for all new mining and coal seam gas developments in NSW to be suspended until there is a strategic plan which protects food security and agricultural land.
In a move to pressure the state Coalition, which is poised to win government next year, about 80 members of the NSW Farmers' Association's executive meeting in Sydney voted unanimously for a moratorium on all new coal, mineral and gas projects, as well as renewals and extensions of developments.
A spokeswoman, Fiona Simson, said that the association had held talks with the opposition and NSW Minerals Council for 10 months, but farmland is increasingly being alienated and 70% of the state is now under mineral and petroleum title or application.
''If we continue to talk without taking a strong stand such as a moratorium, we're going to be talking forever,'' she said.
''Current legislation is against our water, against our food security and it is against our property rights.''
Mrs Simson said farmers were not anti-mining, but their call drew an angry response from the Minerals Council, which said the association was sharing a policy platform with the Greens.
''It is a disproportionate and extreme response … It will affect investment decisions, hurt future job prospects in regional areas and make NSW the 'ugly duckling' of Australian states for doing business,'' said the deputy chief executive officer, Sue-Ern Tan.
However, Mrs Simson said that landholders were often not notified when their property was subject to a new mineral or gas tenement. They were often shocked when they saw a map revealing mining rights covered their part of the state.
Hunter Valley communities had suffered through ''under-handed'' government deals done behind closed doors, the farmers' association councillor, Peter Dixon Hughes, said.
In many cases they could not stop miners from coming on to their land, he said.
A blueprint for all future NSW development, which identifies productive agricultural land and water resources needing protection, tops a list of reforms the farmers want before any moratorium is lifted.
A new office of agricultural sustainability and food security, reporting directly to the premier, should oversee independent, peer-reviewed, scientific analyses of the effect mining or gas extraction would have on productive land and water before it is approved, the farmers say.
The state's Water Act should be overhauled to ensure that any interference with aquifers requires specific planning approval, they argue.
They also want ''robust, independent monitoring'' of any potential impact on air and water quality, and people's health, before exploration and development licences are granted.
Legislation is also needed to ensure landholders affected by mineral and gas extraction are compensated, they say.
Many laws governing mineral and gas extraction are outdated and need significant reform, Mrs Simson said.
The Onshore Petroleum Act ''is seriously ill-equipped'' to regulate coal seam gas extraction, which can involve carving up farms with access roads, she said.
Ms Tan said that a rigorous planning process means mining proposals are scrutinised for social, environmental and economic impact before they are approved.

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Lake Mead approaching lowest level in its history

WATER IN THE DESERT, KINGMAN, ARIZ., EDITION


Posted on | October 16, 2010 | No Comments
KINGMAN, ARIZ. – I made a beeline across two states today, heading for Lake Mead to watch history happen.
It looks as though sometime tomorrow (Sun. 10/17/2010) or Monday, depending on the weather and releases from Hoover Dam for power generation and downstream water users, the surface level of Lake Mead will drop below 1083.19 feet, its low point during drought of the 1950s. As I write this Saturday evening, it’s less than an inch away.
Kingman, Ariz., October 2010
Kingman, Ariz., October 2010
I made it as far as Kingman by sunset, and after checking into my motel grabbed some fast food and headed to a city park. By the time I got there it was pouring, so I hunkered down in the shelter of a utility building and watched. It had the feel of a summer thunderstorm even though it’s mid-October, with thrashing winds, thunder and lightning. It’s fall enough that the wind was blowing leaves off the trees, and my feet got wet and cold (I was wearing sandals). But it was lovely nonetheless. There is a joy to being in the desert in a downpour. As I drove back to the motel, gutters were running full, and kids were splashing.
On the drive over, across northern Arizona, you could still see big patches of piñon pine that died in the drought of 2002-2003.
Tom Yulsman has an excellent post today on the what’s and why’s of  Lake Mead’s situation, to which I don’t have a lot to add. Well, OK, I have a lot to add, enough to write a book, but there will be time enough for that. For now, head over to Tom’s place for an explanation of our big dry, with the money quote from Brad Udall:
. . . what you’re really seeing here is a combination of drought and an overuse problem amongst the three three lower basin states of California, Nevada and Arizona. And that overuse problem historically has been covered up by a little extra water that flows down from Colorado and the upper basin states. But over the last 11 years, with the most serious drought on record, that water hasn’t been there, and so the overuse problem has become readily apparent.
It’s worth noting that the variables that will determine when we drop below that 1950s low are weather and downstream use – how much water nature provides and how we decide to use it. Drought in this sense is very much a human phenomenon.
The response to the convergence of those problems is the 2007 shortage sharing agreement among the lower basin states. It’s a remarkable thing, a set of guidelines to do something that has never been needed before in a century of industrialized development of the Colorado River – to use less water.
One of the reasons I’m heading to Hoover Dam, Lake Mead and Las Vegas is to learn more about how the shortage sharing agreement was developed, and how it will work in practice.  I’m increasingly dissatisfied with the “OMG we’re screwed” narrative. I’m trying to understand the institutional frameworks that have allowed us to go through the 11 driest years on record without anyone’s water being cut off, and to further understand what happens during year 12, which seems to have a good chance of happening in 2011.
In the time I’ve been writing this, Lake Mead dropped another 1/8th of an inch.

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Livestock production set to become unsustainable

Livestock production set to become unsustainable

By mid-century, livestock production may have become unsustainable on three fronts: climate change, use of plant biomass and mobilization of reactive nitrogen. So say researchers from Dalhousie University, Canada, who propose that environmental legislation should rein in growth of the sector.
by Liz Kalaugher, environmentalresearchweb.org, October 6, 2010
The team estimated that by 2050 the livestock sector may account for 72% of the suggested safe operating space for anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, 88% for biomass appropriation and 294% for reactive nitrogen mobilization. The equivalent figures for the year 2000 were 52%, 72% and 117%.
Demand for livestock has been predicted to double by 2050 as populations rise and people in developing countries become richer and begin to eat more meat.
Altering the nitrogen cycle by producing fertilizers and growing nitrogen-fixing crops to feed livestock can increase global warming, produce photochemical smog and acid rain, and lead to biodiversity loss.
"We found that there is modest mitigation potential in substituting less resource efficient – i.e., ruminant [such as cattle and sheep] – for more resource efficient – i.e., poultry – forms of livestock production," Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University toldenvironmentalresearchweb.
What's more, diets using only plant (soybean) protein had a cumulative impact almost two orders of magnitude less than those that were totally based on animal protein. "This underscores the considerable role of dietary choice, and policies that influence consumption patterns in helping us manage for sustainability concerns," said Pelletier.
As ecological economists, Pelletier and colleague Peter Tyedmers are keen to answer the question "how closely are we operating to biocapacity?" They believe that they have joined the dots between the contribution of the livestock sector to environmental change, growth predictions for livestock production and sustainability thresholds.
"In recent years, several researchers have begun to raise the profile of the concept of sustainability thresholds – the work of Rockstrom and colleagues published in Nature last fall, which coined the term 'safe operating space' and defined sustainability thresholds in a suite of domains, is a great example," said Pelletier.
The pair believe it's increasingly important that we incorporate the concept of sustainable scale into policy and management decisions at all levels of governance. "Policies aimed at reining in growth of the livestock sector may be necessary to ensure sustainability," said Pelletier. "Taking advantage of all leverage points will be necessary, including continued increases in efficiency in livestock production, species-substitution where appropriate, and limiting the overall scale of livestock production and consumption in both developed and developing countries."
Next the researchers, who reported their work in PNAS, would like to refine their models. They also plan to assess the mitigation potential of alternative technologies, policies and consumption patterns in helping to meet sustainability objectives at regional and global scales.

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Marc Bierkens: Groundwater depletion rate accelerating worldwide

Groundwater depletion rate accelerating worldwide

AGU, September 24, 2010
In recent decades, the rate at which humans worldwide are pumping dry the vast underground stores of water that billions depend on has more than doubled, say scientists who have conducted an unusual, global assessment of groundwater use.
These fast-shrinking subterranean reservoirs are essential to daily life and agriculture in many regions, while also sustaining streams, wetlands, and ecosystems and resisting land subsidence and salt water intrusion into fresh water supplies. Today, people are drawing so much water from below that they are adding enough of it to the oceans (mainly by evaporation, then precipitation) to account for about 25 percent of the annual sea level rise across the planet, the researchers find.
Soaring global groundwater depletion bodes a potential disaster for an increasingly globalized agricultural system, says Marc Bierkens of Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and leader of the new study.
"If you let the population grow by extending the irrigated areas using groundwater that is not being recharged, then you will run into a wall at a certain point in time, and you will have hunger and social unrest to go with it," Bierkens warns. "That is something that you can see coming for miles."
He and his colleagues will publish their new findings in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
In the new study, which compares estimates of groundwater added by rain and other sources to the amounts being removed for agriculture and other uses, the team taps a database of global groundwater information including maps of groundwater regions and water demand. The researchers also use models to estimate the rates at which groundwater is both added to aquifers and withdrawn. For instance, to determine groundwater recharging rates, they simulate a groundwater layer beneath two soil layers, exposed at the top to rainfall, evaporation, and other effects, and use 44 years worth of precipitation, temperature, and evaporation data (1958–2001) to drive the model.
Applying these techniques worldwide to regions ranging from arid areas to those with the wetness of grasslands, the team finds that the rate at which global groundwater stocks are shrinking has more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, increasing the amount lost from 126 to 283 cubic kilometers (30-68 cubic miles) of water per year. Because the total amount of groundwater in the world is unknown, it's hard to say how fast the global supply would vanish at this rate. But, if water was siphoned as rapidly from the Great Lakes, they would go bone-dry in around 80 years.
Groundwater represents about 30% of the available fresh water on the planet, with surface water accounting for only 1%. The rest of the potable, agriculture friendly supply is locked up in glaciers or the polar ice caps. This means that any reduction in the availability of groundwater supplies could have profound effects for a growing human population.
The new assessment shows the highest rates of depletion in some of the world's major agricultural centers, including northwest India, northeastern China, northeast Pakistan, California's central valley, and the midwestern United States.
"The rate of depletion increased almost linearly from the 1960s to the early 1990s," says Bierkens. "But then you see a sharp increase which is related to the increase of upcoming economies and population numbers; mainly in India and China."
As groundwater is increasingly withdrawn, the remaining water "will eventually be at a level so low that a regular farmer with his technology cannot reach it anymore," says Bierkens. He adds that some nations will be able to use expensive technologies to get fresh water for food production through alternative means like desalinization plants or artificial groundwater recharge, but many won't.
Most water extracted from underground stocks ends up in the ocean, the researchers note. The team estimates the contribution of groundwater depletion to sea level rise to be 0.8 mm per year, which is about a quarter of the current total rate of sea level rise of 3.1 mm per year. That's about as much sea-level rise as caused by the melting of glaciers and icecaps outside of Greenland and Antarctica, and it exceeds or falls into the high end of previous estimates of groundwater depletion's contribution to sea level rise, the researchers add.

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UN warned of major new food crisis at emergency meeting in Rome. Environmental disasters and speculative investors are to blame for volatile food commodities markets, says UN's special adviser


UN warned of major new food crisis at emergency meeting in Rome.

Environmental disasters and speculative investors are to blame for volatile food commodities markets, says UN's special adviser
russia wildfires
July's wildfires in Russia have led to a draconian wheat ban, pushing up prices. Photograph: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA
The world may be on the brink of a major new food crisis caused by environmental disasters and rampant market speculators, the UN was warned today at an emergency meeting on food price inflation.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) meeting in Rome today was called last month after a heatwave and wildfires in Russia led to a draconian wheat export ban and food riots broke out in Mozambique, killing 13 people. But UN experts heard that pension and hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and large banks who speculate on commodity markets may also be responsible for inflation in food prices being seen across all continents.
In a new paper released this week, Olivier De Schutter, the UN's special rapporteur on food, says that the increases in price and the volatility of food commodities can only be explained by the emergence of a "speculative bubble" which he traces back to the early noughties.
"[Beginning in ]2001, food commodities derivatives markets, and commodities indexes began to see an influx of non-traditional investors," De Schutter writes. "The reason for this was because other markets dried up one by one: the dotcoms vanished at the end of 2001, the stock market soon after, and the US housing market in August 2007. As each bubble burst, these large institutional investors moved into other markets, each traditionally considered more stable than the last. Strong similarities can be seen between the price behaviour of food commodities and other refuge values, such as gold."
He continues: "A significant contributory cause of the price spike [has been] speculation by institutional investors who did not have any expertise or interest in agricultural commodities, and who invested in commodities index funds or in order to hedge speculative bets."
A near doubling of many staple food prices in 2007 and 2008 led to riots in more than 30 countries and an estimated 150 million extra people going hungry. While some commodity prices have since reduced, the majority are well over 50% higher than pre-2007 figures – and are now rising quickly upwards again.
"Once again we find ourselves in a situation where basic food commodities are undergoing supply shocks. World wheat futures and spot prices climbed steadily until the beginning of August 2010, when Russia – faced with massive wildfires that destroyed its wheat harvest – imposed an export ban on that commodity. In addition, other markets such as sugar and oilseeds are witnessing significant price increases," said De Schutter, who spoke today at The UK Food Group's conference in London.
Gregory Barrow of the UN World Food Program said: "What we have seen over the past few weeks is a period of volatility driven partly by the announcement from Russia of an export ban on grain food until next year, and this has driven prices up. They have fallen back again, but this has had an impact."
Sergei Sukhov, from Russia's agriculture ministry, told the Associated Press during a break in the meeting in Rome that the market for grains "should be stable and predictable for all participants." He said no efforts should be spared "to the effect that the production of food be sufficient."
"The emergency UN meeting in Rome is a clear warning sign that we could be on the brink of another food price crisis unless swift action is taken. Already, nearly a billion people go to bed hungry every night – another food crisis would be catastrophic for millions of poor people," said Alex Wijeratna, ActionAid's hunger campaigner.
An ActionAid report released last week revealed that hunger could be costing poor nations $450bn a year – more than 10 times the amount needed to halve hunger by 2015 and meet Millennium Development Goal One.
Food prices are rising around 15% a year in India and Nepal, and similarly in Latin America and China. US maize prices this week broke through the $5-a-bushel level for the first time since September 2008, fuelled by reports from US farmers of disappointing yields in the early stages of their harvests. The surge in the corn price also pushed up European wheat prices to a two-year high of €238 a tonne.
Elsewhere, the threat of civil unrest led Egypt this week to announce measures to increase food self-sufficiency to 70%. Partly as a result of food price rises, many middle eastern and other water-scarce countries have begun to invest heavily in farmland in Africa and elsewhere to guarantee supplies.
Although the FAO has rejected the notion of a food crisis on the scale of 2007-2008, it this week warned of greater volatility in food commodities markets in the years ahead.
At the meeting in London today, De Schutter said the only long term way to resolve the crisis would be to shift to "agro-ecological" ways of growing food. This farming, which does not depend on fossil fuels, pesticides or heavy machinery has been shown to protect soils and use less water.
"A growing number of experts are calling for a major shift in food securitypolicies, and support the development of agroecology approaches, which have shown very promising results where implemented," he said.
Green MP Caroline Lucas called for tighter regulation of the food trade. "Food has become a commodity to be traded. The only thing that matters under the current system is profit. Trading in food must not be treated as simply another form of business as usual: for many people it is a matter of life and death. We must insist on the complete removal of agriculture from the remit of the World Trade Organisation," she said.

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Wyoming water may become more scarce with climate change

Report: Wyoming water vulnerable to climate change

by MEAD GRUVER, trib.com, January 31, 2010

The mountain snows that replenish most surface water in Wyoming, the fifth-driest state, are vulnerable to climate change and likely to be affected by rising temperatures, a new report says.

The report released this week by the Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming also says downstream water demand is expected to increase in the decades ahead because of regional population growth.

The Ruckelshaus Institute is a think tank for environmental issues. A variety of interests are represented on the institute's board of directors, including environmental groups, industry, academia and government.

Most of Wyoming's surface water originates as mountain snowpack. Climate change can cause snowpack to melt earlier during the springtime, making runoff more challenging to manage as a water source, the report says.

Reservoir managers have the task of striking a balance between flood control and water storage.

"Moreover, an early runoff leads to diminished late-season flows," the report says, "which are crucial to a wide variety of municipal, agricultural, industrial and environmental uses."

The report also points out that Wyoming is located at the headwaters of several river systems, making the state more vulnerable to drought because not much water flows into the state.

Yet higher temperatures intensify drought.

"The amount of temperature increase that we're expecting in and of itself would have some pretty dramatic effects in Wyoming and the West," said Steve Gray, state climatologist and director of the Water Resources Data System.

The report shows that Wyoming needs to take a "realistic view" of climate change in managing its water, Gray said. That means planning for extremes, not just the average amount of water available.
 
"We just plan around that number rather than asking tougher questions in some ways," he said. "What's our worst case?"

More than 70% of Wyoming receives less than 16 inches of precipitation a year. That's not dry enough to qualify as desert, the report said, but still plenty dry.

Compared to precipitation patterns over the past millennium, the 20th century was unusually wet. Long droughts -- some lasting 50 years or more -- have been fairly common in the region over the long run.

With or without climate change, Gray said, Wyoming should expect such patterns to continue.

One way to do that is to build reservoirs. Another, he said, is to conserve water.

Ruckelshaus board members were struck by a variety of studies about how climate change could affect Wyoming, said Indy Burke, a professor and director of the institute.

"They said, 'My god, the citizens need to know this. We need to get this out," she said.

She said more science is needed to find out what else in Wyoming is sensitive to climate change.

Link:  http://www.trib.com/news/state-and-local/article_c80a020e-91b2-5ee5-8459-a83a73d3b5d6.html

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Lester R. Brown: A hotter planet means less on our plates

A hotter planet means less on our plates



by Lester R. Brown, November 22, 2009

As the U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen approaches, we are in a race between political tipping points and natural ones. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from becoming irreversible? Can we close coal-fired power plants in time to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau? Can we head off ever more intense crop-withering heat waves before they create chaos in world grain markets?

These are all climate-change issues, but they have something else in common: food. Copenhagen will be about climate, of course, but in a fundamental sense, it must also be about whether we will have enough to eat in the decades to come.

We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. As the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets continue to shrink, sea levels will rise, threatening rice harvests around the globe. Recent projections show that the sea could rise up to six feet this century (if the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would rise by 23 feet). According to the World Bank, it would take only a three-foot rise in sea level to cover half the rice fields in Bangladesh, a country of nearly 160 million people. Such an increase would also inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half the rice crop in Vietnam, the world's No. 2 rice exporter. And it would submerge parts of the 20 or so other rice-growing river deltas in Asia.

Melting mountain glaciers are even more worrisome. The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland recently reported the 18th consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers around the world, from the Andes to the Rockies, from the Alps to the mountain ranges of Asia. Of these, the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau threatens to shrink food supplies most sharply. Their annual ice melt sustains the major rivers of India and China -- the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow -- during the dry season. And this water in turn supplies irrigation systems.

Yao Tandong, one of China's leading glaciologists, warned last year in the journal Nature that two-thirds of the country's glaciers could be gone by 2050, and he has said that "the full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe."

It will also lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. China is the world's leading producer of wheat. India is No. 2. These two countries also dominate the world's rice harvest. But unlike in the United States (the third-largest wheat producer), where wheat is watered largely by rainfall, most crops in China and India are irrigated. The vanishing of mountain glaciers in Asia therefore represents the biggest threat to the world food supply that we have ever seen.

Americans may be tempted to see melting glaciers on the Tibetan plateau as China's problem. And they are. But they are also our problem. We live in an era of fully integrated global food markets; a major harvest shortfall in one corner of the world will drive up prices everywhere.

If China can no longer grow enough wheat and rice to feed its 1.3 billion people and goes shopping for massive quantities of grain, global food costs will rise dramatically. When domestic food prices skyrocketed in the 1970s, the United States restricted exports of grain and soybeans. This time around, with China holding $800 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, we won't be in any position to limit exports. China is our banker. China's food shortage will be our shortage, too.

Sea levels and melting glaciers aside, rising temperatures will also have a direct impact on crops around the world. Agriculture as it exists today evolved over an 11,000-year period of remarkable climate stability. The crops we grow were bred to flourish in this climate. But as the weather changes, they will be increasingly out of sync with their environment.

Even a relatively minor increase in temperature will dramatically shrink crop yields. A 2004 study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences showed that for each 1 °C rise in temperature during the growing season, we can expect a 10% decline in rice yields. This appears to hold true for wheat and corn as well. In a world with limited grain stocks, a crop-shrinking heat wave in a major grain-producing region could lead to food shortages and political instability.

While delegates from around the world prepare to gather in Copenhagen, hunger is already spreading. For much of the late 20th century, the number of hungry people declined, bottoming out in the mid-1990s at 825 million. It then turned upward, reaching 873 million around 2005 and passing 1 billion in 2009, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. The combination of rising seas, melting glaciers and crop-decimating heat waves could push these numbers up even faster.

As the number of hungry people has risen, so too has the number of failing states. How much hunger will the world be able to absorb before we have not just failing nations, but a failing global civilization?


Lester R. Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute and the author of "Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization."

Link:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/20/AR2009112002906.html