Evolution of the global virtual water trade network
Carole Dalin,Megan Konar,Naota Hanasaki,Andrea Rinaldo,Andrea Rinaldo,Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe +5 more
TL;DR: It is found that the international food trade has led to enhanced savings in global water resources over time, indicating its growing efficiency in terms of global water use.
read more
Abstract: Global freshwater resources are under increasing pressure from economic development, population growth, and climate change. The international trade of water-intensive products (e.g., agricultural commodities) or virtual water trade has been suggested as a way to save water globally. We focus on the virtual water trade network associated with international food trade built with annual trade data and annual modeled virtual water content. The evolution of this network from 1986 to 2007 is analyzed and linked to trade policies, socioeconomic circumstances, and agricultural efficiency. We find that the number of trade connections and the volume of water associated with global food trade more than doubled in 22 years. Despite this growth, constant organizational features were observed in the network. However, both regional and national virtual water trade patterns significantly changed. Indeed, Asia increased its virtual water imports by more than 170%, switching from North America to South America as its main partner, whereas North America oriented to a growing intraregional trade. A dramatic rise in China's virtual water imports is associated with its increased soy imports after a domestic policy shift in 2000. Significantly, this shift has led the global soy market to save water on a global scale, but it also relies on expanding soy production in Brazil, which contributes to deforestation in the Amazon. We find that the international food trade has led to enhanced savings in global water resources over time, indicating its growing efficiency in terms of global water use.
read more
Chat with Paper
AI Agents for this Paper
Find similar papers on Google Scholar, PubMed and Arxiv
Write a critical review of this paper
Analyze citations of this paper to find unaddressed research gaps
Citations
Can virtual water trade save water resources
Xi Liu,Huibin Du,Zengkai Zhang,John C. Crittenden,Michael L. Lahr,Juan Moreno-Cruz,Dabo Guan,Zhifu Mi,Jian Zuo +8 more
TL;DR: An urgent need to consider trade types and water scarcity when developing water resource allocation and conservation policies is revealed.
93
Dynamics of the Global Wheat Trade Network and Resilience to Shocks.
TL;DR: It is concluded that dynamic models of multi-annual, commodity-specific networks should be further developed to gain insight into possible futures of global agri-food trade networks.
Global effects of local food-production crises: a virtual water perspective.
TL;DR: The model serves as the basis to propose indicators of crisis impact and country vulnerability to external food-production crises, which highlight that countries with largest water resources have the highest impact on the international trade, and that not only water-scarce but also wealthy and globalized countries are among the most vulnerable to external crises.
Water footprints of cities - indicators for sustainable consumption and production
Holger Hoff,Holger Hoff,Petra Döll,Marianela Fader,Marianela Fader,Dieter Gerten,Stefan Hauser,Stefan Siebert +7 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed the existing water footprint methodology, by globally resolving virtual water flows from production to consumption regions for major food crops at 5 arcmin spatial resolution, and assessed local impacts of export production.
Environmental footprints show China and Europe’s evolving resource appropriation for soybean production in Mato Grosso, Brazil
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present environmental footprints of soybean production in Mato Grosso and resource flows accompanying exports to China and Europe for the 2000s using five indicators: deforestation, land footprint (LF), carbon footprint (CF), water footprint (WF), and nutrient footprints.
References
Solutions for a cultivated planet
Jonathan A. Foley,Navin Ramankutty,Kate A. Brauman,E. S. Cassidy,James S. Gerber,M. Johnston,Nathaniel D. Mueller,Christine S. O’Connell,Deepak K. Ray,Paul C. West,Christian Balzer,Elena M. Bennett,Stephen R. Carpenter,Jason Hill,Chad Monfreda,Stephen Polasky,Johan Rockström,John Sheehan,Stefan Siebert,David Tilman,David P. M. Zaks +20 more
TL;DR: It is shown that tremendous progress could be made by halting agricultural expansion, closing ‘yield gaps’ on underperforming lands, increasing cropping efficiency, shifting diets and reducing waste, which could double food production while greatly reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture.
Global Water Resources: Vulnerability from Climate Change and Population Growth
TL;DR: Numerical experiments combining climate model outputs, water budgets, and socioeconomic information along digitized river networks demonstrate that (i) a large proportion of the world's population is currently experiencing water stress and (ii) rising water demands greatly outweigh greenhouse warming in defining the state of global water systems to 2025.
5.1K
Farming the planet: 1. Geographic distribution of global agricultural lands in the year 2000
TL;DR: In the year 2000, the United Nations reported that 28.6 million km 2 of cropland (12% of the Earth's ice-free land surface) and 28.0 (90% confidence range of 23.6-30.0) million km2 of pasture (22%) were converted to pasture as mentioned in this paper.
2K
Farming the planet: 2. Geographic distribution of crop areas, yields, physiological types, and net primary production in the year 2000
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present land use data sets created by combining national, state, and county level census statistics with a recently updated global data set of croplands on a 5 min by 5 min (∼10 km by 10 km) latitude-longitude grid.
1.9K
Agricultural green and blue water consumption and its influence on the global water system
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors quantified, spatially explicitly and in a consistent modeling framework (Lund-Potsdam-Jena managed Land), the global consumption of both blue water (withdrawn for irrigation from rivers, lakes and aquifers) and green water (precipitation) by rainfed and irrigated agriculture and by nonagricultural terrestrial ecosystems.
853