Food, energy and water demand integrated approach

T.V. Padma in SciDev.net: Improvements in food, energy and water sectors need to be tackled together in an integrated manner to address climate change impacts, says Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chair of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“I hope people will understand the integration of food, energy and water (sectors). Each one of these has to be seen as part of the whole,” Pachauri tells SciDev.Net ahead of the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, being organised by The Energy and Resources Research Institute this week (6—8 February).

Pachauri observed that as populations and incomes continue to grow, the demand on the three sectors was also growing, calling for efficient use of resources in all three areas and attention to the technological and economic issues linked to them.

“I think that what we hope to do is ensure that all these three (sectors) are seen as the integrated elements of a much larger complex. And I think that we would have to make sure that each one of these is seen in terms of how developments are going to take place in the future,” he said. He cited as examples of the inter-linkages among the three areas as the fact that energy was needed to provide water for irrigation and how water was needed to carry out any agriculture.

Lisa Grande, United Nations Development programme (UNDP's) resident representative in India, said in a message that food, energy and water security were the greatest challenges facing India, and the "magnitude of these problems is serious"....

"Abundance" by Rubens

Similar early warning signals of change in climate, ecosystems, financial markets, human health

National Science Foundation: What do abrupt changes in ocean circulation and Earth's climate, shifts in wildlife populations and ecosystems, the global finance market and its system-wide crashes, and asthma attacks and epileptic seizures have in common? According to a paper published this week in the journal Nature, all share generic early-warning signals that indicate a critical threshold of change dead ahead.

In the paper, Martin Scheffer of Wageningen University in The Netherlands and co-authors, including William Brock and Stephen Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., found that similar symptoms occur in many systems as they approach a critical state of transition. "It's increasingly clear that many complex systems have critical thresholds--'tipping points'--at which these systems shift abruptly from one state to another," write the scientists in their paper.

Especially relevant, they discovered, is that "catastrophic bifurcations," a diverging of the ways, propel a system toward a new state once a certain threshold is exceeded. … "These are compelling insights into the transitions in human and natural systems," says Henry Gholz, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Environmental Biology, which supported the research along with NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences.

"The information comes at a critical time--a time when Earth's and, our fragility, have been highlighted by global financial collapses, debates over health care reform, and concern about rapid change in climate and ecological systems."

It all comes down to what scientists call "squealing," or "variance amplification near critical points," when a system moves back and forth between two states. "A system may shift permanently to an altered state if an underlying slow change in conditions persists, moving it to a new situation," says Carpenter. Eutrophication in lakes, shifts in climate, and epileptic seizures all are preceded by squealing….

Early warning indicators have been found in Wisconsin's side-by-side Peter and Paul Lakes. Credit: Steve Carpenter, University of Wisconsin