'Food and water gaps to 2050: preliminary results from the global food and water system (GFWS) platform'

Members of the FE2W Network, Prof. Quentin Grafton, Dr. John Williams and Dr. Qiang Jiang, have published an open-access article reviewing the pressures, threats and risks to national food and water availability to 2050 using the Global Food and Water System (GFWS) platform. The article is published in a special issue of the Food Security journal entitled ‘Feeding more than 9 billion by 2050: challenges and opportunities’. A pdf version of the article is available through this link or through the special issue contents page here.

The GFWS platform is used to explore food availability deficits for scenarios of crop production under various fertiliser, water use, crop improvement and land use options. Preliminary results indicate that crop-based food supply is able to meet food requirements by 2050, but this is only possible with ‘input intensification’ that includes increased rates of water in irrigated agriculture and fertiliser use per hectare and continued annual growth of crop yield productivity improvement of at least 0.5 % per year over the period.