"When nitrogen limited fields are targeted ... yield gains are predicted to double. When nitrogen and irrigation co-limitations are targeted ... yield ... tripled." Lots of potential to raise yields in Indian rice production with tried and tested technologies. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Rice production in India is a foundation for global food security, but strategies for sustainable intensification are uncertain. By combining large-scale surveys with predictive modeling, the authors ...
"using biofuels to achieve 0.7 ± 0.3 Gt CO2-eq yr−1 mitigation would require new nitrogen inputs to croplands of 21–42 Tg N yr−1. " 1 Tg is 1 million tons. So that sounds like... a lot of nitrogen. www.nature.com/articles/s43...
Decarbonization strategies can perturb the nitrogen cycle through elevating nitrogen inputs to the environment, potentially driving increased eutrophication. This Review explores the potential synergi...
Not necessarily. If water was a big cost of production and water efficiency went up, prices would go down and demand up. I'm not sure what % of costs water is but I don't think it's high enough to lead to a lot of rebound. Especially considering that much of global production is rainfed.
However, total crop production went up by so much that total water use increased by 30%. Relative but not absolute decoupling, in other words.
Global crop production is getting more water-efficient. This new paper finds that "nearly 80% of crops reduced global average unit [water footprints] as crop yields improved and cultivation centred around more productive areas" iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
I guess I buck this trend, my dad being a beekeeper, me doing a PhD
Electrification reduces deforestation and fuelwood collection in this case study from Côte d’Ivoire: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
This paper investigates the impact of electrification on household practices related to deforestation in Côte d’Ivoire, specifically focusing on the e…
I wrote about some of these possibilities and the issue with energy here: thebreakthrough.org/issues/conse....
Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.” While Monbiot radically overstates the imminence of such a transformation, the large scale producti...
Landless agriculture is possible but energy-intensive. While not an immediate solution to land-related problems, this could one day - with the right energy system - usher in opportunities for conservation that we can only dream about today. Review: bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
The vast majority of the food we eat comes from land-based agriculture, but recent technological advances in agriculture and food technology offer the prospect of producing food using substantially le...
Ouch. Systematic review finds that of 561 degrowth studies, large majority are "opinions rather than analysis", very few use modelling, use ad-hoc and subjective policy advice and lack policy evaluation, and few studies adopt a system-wide perspective. Doesn't make them wrong - but need to step up.
In the last decade many publications have appeared on degrowth as a strategy to confront environmental and social problems. We undertake a systematic …