Plant disease outbreaks are increasing and threaten food security for the vulnerable in many areas of the world. Now a global human pandemic is threatening the health of millions on our planet. A ...stable, nutritious food supply will be needed to lift people out of poverty and improve health outcomes. Plant diseases, both endemic and recently emerging, are spreading and exacerbated by climate change, transmission with global food trade networks, pathogen spillover, and evolution of new pathogen lineages. In order to tackle these grand challenges, a new set of tools that include disease surveillance and improved detection technologies including pathogen sensors and predictive modeling and data analytics are needed to prevent future outbreaks. Herein, we describe an integrated research agenda that could help mitigate future plant disease pandemics.
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Global modeling of nature's contributions to people Chaplin-Kramer, Rebecca; Sharp, Richard P; Weil, Charlotte ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
10/2019, Volume:
366, Issue:
6462
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The magnitude and pace of global change demand rapid assessment of nature and its contributions to people. We present a fine-scale global modeling of current status and future scenarios for several ...contributions: water quality regulation, coastal risk reduction, and crop pollination. We find that where people's needs for nature are now greatest, nature's ability to meet those needs is declining. Up to 5 billion people face higher water pollution and insufficient pollination for nutrition under future scenarios of land use and climate change, particularly in Africa and South Asia. Hundreds of millions of people face heightened coastal risk across Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. Continued loss of nature poses severe threats, yet these can be reduced 3- to 10-fold under a sustainable development scenario.
Managing ecosystem services in the context of global sustainability policies requires reliable monitoring mechanisms. While satellite Earth observation offers great promise to support this need, ...significant challenges remain in quantifying connections between ecosystem functions, ecosystem services, and human well-being benefits. Here, we provide a framework showing how Earth observation together with socioeconomic information and model-based analysis can support assessments of ecosystem service supply, demand, and benefit, and illustrate this for three services. We argue that the full potential of Earth observation is not yet realized in ecosystem service studies. To provide guidance for priority setting and to spur research in this area, we propose five priorities to advance the capabilities of Earth observation-based monitoring of ecosystem services.
We are at a critical juncture in international decision-making about how to reconcile the growing human demands for natural resources with the long-term insurance of ecosystem service provisioning.
The full potential of satellite Earth observation is not yet realized in ecosystem service studies, but it offers great promise to support monitoring mechanisms in the context of global sustainability policies.
We provide a framework showing how Earth observation together with socio-economic information and model-based analysis can support assessments of ecosystem service supply, demand, and benefit, and illustrate this for three services.
Joint work among social scientists, ecologists, and remote-sensing specialists is needed to operationalize and implement the recommendations we give here and to address important gaps in current knowledge.
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Irrigation consumes more water than any other human activity, and thus the challenges of water sustainability and food security are closely linked. To evaluate how water resources are used for food ...production, we examined global patterns of water productivity-food produced (kcal) per unit of water (l) consumed. We document considerable variability in crop water productivity globally, not only across different climatic zones but also within climatic zones. The least water productive systems are disproportionate freshwater consumers. On precipitation-limited croplands, we found that ∼40% of water consumption goes to production of just 20% of food calories. Because in many cases crop water productivity is well below optimal levels, in many cases farmers have substantial opportunities to improve water productivity. To demonstrate the potential impact of management interventions, we calculated that raising crop water productivity in precipitation-limited regions to the 20th percentile of productivity would increase annual production on rainfed cropland by enough to provide food for an estimated 110 million people, and water consumption on irrigated cropland would be reduced enough to meet the annual domestic water demands of nearly 1.4 billion people.
Achieving sustainable global food security is one of humanity's contemporary challenges. Here we present an analysis identifying key "global leverage points" that offer the best opportunities to ...improve both global food security and environmental sustainability. We find that a relatively small set of places and actions could provide enough new calories to meet the basic needs for more than 3 billion people, address many environmental impacts with global consequences, and focus food waste reduction on the commodities with the greatest impact on food security. These leverage points in the global food system can help guide how nongovernmental organizations, foundations, governments, citizens' groups, and businesses prioritize actions.
Despite broad recognition of the value of the goods and services provided by nature, existing tools for assessing and valuing ecosystem services often fall short of the needs and expectations of ...decision makers. Here we address one of the most important missing components in the current ecosystem services toolbox: a comprehensive and generalizable framework for describing and valuing water quality-related services. Water quality is often misrepresented as a final ecosystem service. We argue that it is actually an important contributor to many different services, from recreation to human health. We present a valuation approach for water quality-related services that is sensitive to different actions that affect water quality, identifies aquatic endpoints where the consequences of changing water quality on human well-being are realized, and recognizes the unique groups of beneficiaries affected by those changes. We describe the multiple biophysical and economic pathways that link actions to changes in water qualityrelated ecosystem goods and services and provide guidance to researchers interested in valuing these changes. Finally, we present a valuation template that integrates biophysical and economic models, links actions to changes in service provision and value estimates, and considers multiple sources of water quality-related ecosystem service values without double counting.
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Global trends in nature’s contributions to people Brauman, Kate A.; Garibaldi, Lucas A.; Polasky, Stephen ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
12/2020, Volume:
117, Issue:
51
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Declining biodiversity and ecosystem functions put many of nature’s contributions to people at risk. We review and synthesize the scientific literature to assess 50-y global trends across a broad ...range of nature’s contributions. We distinguish among trends in potential and realized contributions of nature, as well as environmental conditions and the impacts of changes in nature on human quality of life. We find declining trends in the potential for nature to contribute in the majority of material, nonmaterial, and regulating contributions assessed. However, while the realized production of regulating contributions has decreased, realized production of agricultural and many material commodities has increased. Environmental declines negatively affect quality of life, but social adaptation and the availability of substitutes partially offset this decline for some of nature’s contributions. Adaptation and substitutes, however, are often imperfect and come at some cost. For many of the contributions of nature, we find differing trends across different countries and regions, income classes, and ethnic and social groups, reinforcing the argument for more consistent and equitable measurement.
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Fresh water—the bloodstream of the biosphere—is at the center of the planetary drama of the Anthropocene. Water fluxes and stores regulate the Earth's climate and are essential for thriving aquatic ...and terrestrial ecosystems, as well as water, food, and energy security. But the water cycle is also being modified by humans at an unprecedented scale and rate. A holistic understanding of freshwater's role for Earth system resilience and the detection and monitoring of anthropogenic water cycle modifications across scales is urgent, yet existing methods and frameworks are not well suited for this. In this paper we highlight four core Earth system functions of water (hydroclimatic regulation, hydroecological regulation, storage, and transport) and key related processes. Building on systems and resilience theory, we review the evidence of regional‐scale regime shifts and disruptions of the Earth system functions of water. We then propose a framework for detecting, monitoring, and establishing safe limits to water cycle modifications and identify four possible spatially explicit methods for their quantification. In sum, this paper presents an ambitious scientific and policy grand challenge that could substantially improve our understanding of the role of water in the Earth system and cross‐scale management of water cycle modifications that would be a complementary approach to existing water management tools.
Plain language summary
Freshwater is crucially important for all life on Earth. There is abundant research and evidence on how different processes within the water cycle regulate climate and support ecosystems, and by extension, human societies. Humans are also a major force disturbing those processes and modifying the water cycle. These modifications include, for instance, surface water withdrawals, groundwater pumping, deforestation and other land cover change, and ice melt due to warming climate. As most previous research on human–water interactions focuses on understanding systems at smaller scales, such as a watershed or a nation, comprehensive understanding of what human modifications of the water cycle mean for the stability of the planet is still lacking. In this paper we propose a new framework for analysing and establishing limits to a variety of human modifications of the water cycle, to ensure that the stability of the Earth would not be compromised. We see this as an important and urgent scientific challenge that has the potential to substantially improve our understanding of the functioning of the Earth system and to inform local and global policy toward a more sustainable future.
Key Points
Earth system resilience depends on an improved understanding and management of water cycle modifications
We identify four key functions of freshwater in the Earth system and evidence of regional to global regime shifts and disruptions
The water planetary boundary is a compelling framework to improve our understanding and management of water cycle modifications in the Earth system
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The human impact on life on Earth has increased sharply since the 1970s, driven by the demands of a growing population with rising average per capita income. Nature is currently supplying more ...materials than ever before, but this has come at the high cost of unprecedented global declines in the extent and integrity of ecosystems, distinctness of local ecological communities, abundance and number of wild species, and the number of local domesticated varieties. Such changes reduce vital benefits that people receive from nature and threaten the quality of life of future generations. Both the benefits of an expanding economy and the costs of reducing nature's benefits are unequally distributed. The fabric of life on which we all depend-nature and its contributions to people-is unravelling rapidly. Despite the severity of the threats and lack of enough progress in tackling them to date, opportunities exist to change future trajectories through transformative action. Such action must begin immediately, however, and address the root economic, social, and technological causes of nature's deterioration.
Abstract Water scarcity is a global challenge affecting billions of people worldwide. This study systematically assesses differences in the estimation of the global population exposed to water ...scarcity based on 7 water scarcity indicators and 11 Environmental Flow Requirements (EFR) evaluated at various spatial and temporal resolutions. All indicators show an increase in water scarcity since 1901. However, considering monthly average water scarcity estimates spatially aggregated at the basin scale found 35% less population exposed than estimates based on a distributed grid over the landscape. Estimates temporally disaggregated to consider water scarcity for at least one month a year found 50% (tenfold) larger population exposed compared to average monthly (annual) estimates. The study illustrates that estimates of the impacts of water scarcity are an artifact of how water scarcity is defined and calculated. This suggests caution is needed when relying on a single method and emphasizes the importance of considering the diversity of factors that can influence estimates of impact when assessing water scarcity.
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