The Quadruple Squeeze: Defining the safe operating space for freshwater use to achieve a triply green revolution in the Anthropocene |
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Authors: | Johan Rockström Louise Karlberg |
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Institution: | 1.Stockholm Environment Institute and Stockholm Resilience Centre,Stockholm,Sweden |
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Abstract: | Humanity has entered a new phase of sustainability challenges, the Anthropocene, in which human development has reached a
scale where it affects vital planetary processes. Under the pressure from a quadruple squeeze—from population and development
pressures, the anthropogenic climate crisis, the anthropogenic ecosystem crisis, and the risk of deleterious tipping points
in the Earth system—the degrees of freedom for sustainable human exploitation of planet Earth are severely restrained. It
is in this reality that a new green revolution in world food production needs to occur, to attain food security and human
development over the coming decades. Global freshwater resources are, and will increasingly be, a fundamental limiting factor
in feeding the world. Current water vulnerabilities in the regions in most need of large agricultural productivity improvements
are projected to increase under the pressure from global environmental change. The sustainability challenge for world agriculture
has to be set within the new global sustainability context. We present new proposed sustainability criteria for world agriculture,
where world food production systems are transformed in order to allow humanity to stay within the safe operating space of
planetary boundaries. In order to secure global resilience and thereby raise the chances of planet Earth to remain in the
current desired state, conducive for human development on the long-term, these planetary boundaries need to be respected.
This calls for a triply green revolution, which not only more than doubles food production in many regions of the world, but
which also is environmentally sustainable, and invests in the untapped opportunities to use green water in rainfed agriculture
as a key source of future productivity enhancement. To achieve such a global transformation of agriculture, there is a need
for more innovative options for water interventions at the landscape scale, accounting for both green and blue water, as well
as a new focus on cross-scale interactions, feed-backs and risks for unwanted regime shifts in the agro-ecological landscape. |
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