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Agro-economic and socio-environmental assessments of food and virtual water trades of Iran
Ending hunger and ensuring food security are among targets of 2030’s SDGs. While food trade and the embedded (virtual) water (VW) may improve food availability and accessibility for more people all year round, the sustainability and efficiency of food and VW trade needs to be revisited. In this rese...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Nature Publishing Group UK
2021
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8298399/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34294765 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-93928-9 |
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author | Karandish, Fatemeh Nouri, Hamideh Brugnach, Marcela |
author_facet | Karandish, Fatemeh Nouri, Hamideh Brugnach, Marcela |
author_sort | Karandish, Fatemeh |
collection | PubMed |
description | Ending hunger and ensuring food security are among targets of 2030’s SDGs. While food trade and the embedded (virtual) water (VW) may improve food availability and accessibility for more people all year round, the sustainability and efficiency of food and VW trade needs to be revisited. In this research, we assess the sustainability and efficiency of food and VW trades under two food security scenarios for Iran, a country suffering from an escalating water crisis. These scenarios are (1) Individual Crop Food Security (ICFS), which restricts calorie fulfillment from individual crops and (2) Crop Category Food Security (CCFS), which promotes “eating local” by suggesting food substitution within the crop category. To this end, we simulate the water footprint and VW trades of 27 major crops, within 8 crop categories, in 30 provinces of Iran (2005–2015). We investigate the impacts of these two scenarios on (a) provincial food security (FS(p)) and exports; (b) sustainable and efficient blue water consumption, and (c) blue VW export. We then test the correlation between agro-economic and socio-environmental indicators and provincial food security. Our results show that most provinces were threatened by unsustainable and inefficient blue water consumption for crop production, particularly in the summertime. This water mismanagement results in 14.41 and 8.45 billion m(3) y(−1) unsustainable and inefficient blue VW exports under ICFS. “Eating local” improves the FS(p) value by up to 210% which lessens the unsustainable and inefficient blue VW export from hotspots. As illustrated in the graphical abstract, the FS(p) value strongly correlates with different agro-economic and socio-environmental indicators, but in different ways. Our findings promote “eating local” besides improving agro-economic and socio-environmental conditions to take transformative steps toward eradicating food insecurity not only in Iran but also in other countries facing water limitations. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8298399 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-82983992021-07-23 Agro-economic and socio-environmental assessments of food and virtual water trades of Iran Karandish, Fatemeh Nouri, Hamideh Brugnach, Marcela Sci Rep Article Ending hunger and ensuring food security are among targets of 2030’s SDGs. While food trade and the embedded (virtual) water (VW) may improve food availability and accessibility for more people all year round, the sustainability and efficiency of food and VW trade needs to be revisited. In this research, we assess the sustainability and efficiency of food and VW trades under two food security scenarios for Iran, a country suffering from an escalating water crisis. These scenarios are (1) Individual Crop Food Security (ICFS), which restricts calorie fulfillment from individual crops and (2) Crop Category Food Security (CCFS), which promotes “eating local” by suggesting food substitution within the crop category. To this end, we simulate the water footprint and VW trades of 27 major crops, within 8 crop categories, in 30 provinces of Iran (2005–2015). We investigate the impacts of these two scenarios on (a) provincial food security (FS(p)) and exports; (b) sustainable and efficient blue water consumption, and (c) blue VW export. We then test the correlation between agro-economic and socio-environmental indicators and provincial food security. Our results show that most provinces were threatened by unsustainable and inefficient blue water consumption for crop production, particularly in the summertime. This water mismanagement results in 14.41 and 8.45 billion m(3) y(−1) unsustainable and inefficient blue VW exports under ICFS. “Eating local” improves the FS(p) value by up to 210% which lessens the unsustainable and inefficient blue VW export from hotspots. As illustrated in the graphical abstract, the FS(p) value strongly correlates with different agro-economic and socio-environmental indicators, but in different ways. Our findings promote “eating local” besides improving agro-economic and socio-environmental conditions to take transformative steps toward eradicating food insecurity not only in Iran but also in other countries facing water limitations. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-07-22 /pmc/articles/PMC8298399/ /pubmed/34294765 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-93928-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Karandish, Fatemeh Nouri, Hamideh Brugnach, Marcela Agro-economic and socio-environmental assessments of food and virtual water trades of Iran |
title | Agro-economic and socio-environmental assessments of food and virtual water trades of Iran |
title_full | Agro-economic and socio-environmental assessments of food and virtual water trades of Iran |
title_fullStr | Agro-economic and socio-environmental assessments of food and virtual water trades of Iran |
title_full_unstemmed | Agro-economic and socio-environmental assessments of food and virtual water trades of Iran |
title_short | Agro-economic and socio-environmental assessments of food and virtual water trades of Iran |
title_sort | agro-economic and socio-environmental assessments of food and virtual water trades of iran |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8298399/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34294765 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-93928-9 |
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