Browsing by Author "Marston, Landon"
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Item Beyond the Green Revolution: A roadmap for sustainable food systems research and action(Environmental Research Letters, 2022-09-29) Davis, Kyle Frankel; Dalin, Carole; Kummu, Matti; Marston, Landon; Pingali, Prabhu; Tuninetti, MartaThe Green Revolution produced remarkable achievements in increasing food supply while leading to a suite of compromises for economic, social, and environmental outcomes [1]—including ongoing needs for rural development [2], persistent widespread malnutrition [3] and the transgression of multiple planetary boundaries [4]. To sustainably meet the grand challenge of feeding a growing and more affluent population in the coming decades, there is wide recognition that food system transitions must build upon the benefits of past food system advances while overcoming their many shortcomings [5–7]—a problem further complicated by an increasingly interconnected food system [8–11] and its interactions with a changing climate [12–14]. Food system actors—including policy makers, corporations, farmers, and consumers—must meet this challenge while considering potentially conflicting priorities [15], such as environmental sustainability, economic viability, nutrition and human health, and resilience to climate change and other environmental and socio-political disruptions. Successfully navigating this deep and growing complexity to meet multiple goals simultaneously—while avoiding or minimizing tradeoffs (e.g. [16])—is the crux of achieving sustainable and resilient food systems. New thinking is needed to shed light on the solutions for food system sustainability and the pathways to its realization, including overcoming political economy constraints to effective policy change. Here we take the pulse of our emerging understanding of food system sustainability—drawing from new food systems work in this Focus Issue—and outline three key aims to guide future research and action.Item Half of twenty-first century global irrigation expansion has been in water-stressed regions(Nature Water, 2024-03-08) Mehta, Piyush; Siebert, Stefan; Kummu, Matti; Deng, Qinyu; Ali, Tariq; Marston, Landon; Xie, Wei; Davis, Kyle FrankelThe expansion of irrigated agriculture has increased global crop production but resulted in widespread stress on freshwater resources. Ensuring that increases in irrigated production occur only in places where water is relatively abundant is a key objective of sustainable agriculture and knowledge of how irrigated land has evolved is important for measuring progress towards water sustainability. Yet, a spatially detailed understanding of the evolution of the global area equipped for irrigation (AEI) is missing. In this study, we used the latest subnational irrigation statistics (covering 17,298 administrative units) from various official sources to develop a gridded (5 arcmin resolution) global product of AEI for the years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. We found that AEI increased by 11% from 2000 (297 Mha) to 2015 (330 Mha), with areas of both substantial expansion, such as northwest India and northeast China, and decline, such as Russia. Combining these outputs with information on green (that is, rainfall) and blue (that is, surface and ground) water stress, we also examined to what extent irrigation has expanded unsustainably in places already experiencing water stress. We found that more than half (52%) of the irrigation expansion has taken place in areas that were already water-stressed in the year 2000, with India alone accounting for 36% of global unsustainable expansion. These findings provide new insights into the evolving patterns of global irrigation with important implications for global water sustainability and food security.