In this course you will become familiar with the ideas of the water-energy-food nexus and transdisciplinary thinking.
You will learn to see your community or country as a complex social-ecological system and to describe its water, energy and food metabolism in the form of a pattern, as well as to map the categories of social actors.
We will provide you with the tools to measure the nexus elements and to analyze them in a coherent way across scales and dimensions of analysis. In this way, your quantitative analysis will become useful for informed decision-making. You will be able to detect and quantify dependence on non-renewable resources and externalization of environmental problems to other societies and ecosystems (a popular ‘solution’ in the western world). Practical case studies, from both developed and developing countries, will help you evaluate the state-of-play of a given community or country and to evaluate possible solutions. Last but not least, you will learn to see pressing social-ecological issues, such as energy poverty, water scarcity and inequity, from a radically different perspective, and to question everything you’ve been told so far.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Part of the results and case studies presented have been developed within two projects: MAGIC and PARTICIPIA. However, the course does not reflect the views of the funding institutions or of the project partners as a whole, and the case studies were presented purely with an educational and illustrative purpose.

Рецензии

AD

Wonderful course about us and the environment! If you are a data loving philosopher this will be your dream (as it was for me) :) - Would love to get more lectures from this courses' teachers!

AL

Mar 31, 2018

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Everybody should learn this !\n\nIt will change my way of looking at sustainability as promised by Prof. Giampietro.\n\nTHX

Из урока

Module 5. The challenge of water accounting

This week is all about water. By now you should be familiar with the concept of grammar, and we will see how building one for water can help in dealing with its many dimensions. Through the example of an analysis of the Mauritius Islands, you will become familiar with the many aspects of water accounting, and by the end of the week you will understand the importance of water in nexus analysis, especially when it comes to policymaking.

Преподаватели

Mario Giampietro

Andrea Saltelli

Tarik Serrano

Текст видео

[MUSIC] This is week five, lesson three, session b. And today we are going to present the case study mixing food security and aquifer depletion in Punjab, India. So today I'm going to show some unsustainable trends in relation to water and their main drivers. I'm going to illustrate the pressure that national food trade, concretely cereal, is putting on the aquifers of the Punjab region. So, there is a recent study by Dalin et al., who shows that most of the ground water depletion is embedded in the trade of crop commodities. As you can see in this figure, India is one of the biggest contributors to that. So in Punjab, we have mostly a rural population. It is mostly men working in the fields and also working in the urban settlements. If we look at the GDP per capita, the segregation, we find something which is a bit strange. The Punjab has an average per capita GDP of 1500 US dollars. However, which is relatively high if you compare it with the 31% contribution of the agriculture to the GDP of the country. Now, if you compare regions with similar GDPs, like Kerala, You would see that, sorry, with similar GDP per capita like Kerala, you will see that the contribution to agriculture of the GDP is much lower. In this case, it's half of it. And if you compare with other regions, we have similar contribution of agriculture to the GDP, you will see that the per capita GDP is much much lower. So we were asking ourselves what happened here. What is the agriculture doing in Punjab? So, Punjab has a very much oversized cereal production, so they consume only 4 tons of the 27 billion tons they produce. That has a high impact on water, energy and land. For the case of water, you can see how the use of water from wells has increased in the last years, mostly because the energy for pumping water has been subsidized. The energy graph is showing how the water is pumped, and you can also see how the electricity use for agriculture has grown in the last years. So let's go to the mix of the watershed and the problemshed perspectives that we have been talking about. Let's look at the problemshed side. We have a direct use of water, we have divided that use of water in distributed and non-distributed water, and we have disaggregate that by social function. So we see in the direct use of water we have estimated water that has been used to irrigate the agriculture in this case all of it independently of where that agricultural production was consumed. You can see that the total for Punjab is 40 cubic kilometers. In case of the end use, we have estimated the water that was necessary to produce the food that is actually consumed within India. And you can see, within Punjab, and you can see how this is so much lower. It's only 11 cubic kilometers. So in terms of viability, we can say that the Punjab is using in the water to produce food pretty much for the rest of India. So how is that maintained? It's actually maintained with a very high subsidized price for the cereal. Which is actually why the GDP per capita for Punjab is much higher than all the regions with similar contribution of agriculture to the GDP. Now, what does this mean in terms of visibility? If we look at the watershed side we can see how the appropriation of water, in this case counting obstruction and pollution, has modified the environment. We have a series of indicators, including the Ramsar spaces which are in risk, you see that the Punjab has three wetlands, protected wetlands, and all three are in danger. We have six regions out of 25 with problems of salinity in the water, also with over nitrate 16 of 25 and over metal contents of ten of 25. So, as you can see, the use of water is producing an appropriation of the water fans of the water bodies that is not sustainable in the long term. If you look at the quantitative part in the second world you will see how much water Punjab is entitled to use due to international treaties. Now the extraction from rivers and aquifers is a little bit higher of what they are entitled to. That means that that invisible metabolic patterns can only bring some international conflicts due to the accomplishment of this treaty. If we look at the inside of the Punjab, dividing between ecosystems and society, and flows and funds, like we presented in sessions before. We find that the Punjab society is within a Punjab ecosystem. Now, the Punjab society produces food for a value of 27 tons, but they only need four of them. In order to produce the cereal and other social functions, they need an amount of water with a rate of nine cubic meters per hour and three per cubic meters per hour, respectively. What does this mean? Obviously cereal needs much more water per hour than other functions, including other types of agricultural production. At the same time, the Punjab ecosystem is able to supply a certain amount of water with a return that is about twenty one cubic kilometers per year. If we mix the two of them, if we compare the external view with this internal view what we have is the water flows of the societies actually taken. So in a network like this, we can show in one picture where the key issues of the system are. In this case, if you look to the lower right side of the graph, you see that the water table of aquifers for example is going lower a meter every year. Some conclusions for this case data is the food security and water security as we all know are deeply connected. In this case, a national policy that is too much focused on the food security of the country and promoting the production of cereal is creating serious challenges for the future production of cereal, making this water metabolic pattern fully unfeasible.