Water To Food engages in the dissemination of the results achieved within the CWASI (Coping with water scarcity in a globalized world) project.
The project, which is led by Professor Francesco Laio at Politecnico di Torino and funded by the European Research Council, pioneered the scientific research about the agricultural water consumption for food production and trade.
The Water Footprint (WF) indicator, introduced in the early 2000s by Arjen Hoekstra, provides a tool to assess water use for food production in space and time, at different resolution scales. Our research develops upon the results from Hoekstra and advances the state of the art about the evaluation of Water Footprint in time and space for several crucial food products. All you need to know about it is collected in this section.
READ MOREInternational food trade is vital for food security: about one-fourth of the food produced for human consumption is traded internationally. The water used by producing areas (or exporting areas) is virtually transferred to consumption areas (or importing areas) through the trade of agricultural commodities. What are the implications of this trade for water resources? Discover more by browsing our publications on the topic.
READ MOREThere are many socio-economic and policy factors driving the virtual water of production, consumption, and trade, at both local and global scales. These include population dynamics, political considerations, and economic relationships across countries. This collection contains our research about these factors and their effects on water resources consumption.
READ MOREDue to the globalization of resources as governed by trade, countries' dynamics are highly entangled and interconnected. Many countries actually rely on imports to meet their local demand for food, thus ensuring national food security. However, this is just one side of the same coin: when a crisis occurs in one part of the globe, its effects are spread worldwide due to commercial relationships. This also determines countries' vulnerabilities to induced shocks: the more a country relies on imported resources, the more its vulnerability to induced shocks. However, not all crises are the same, nor all countries respond in the same way: here's what to know.
READ MOREFood production can impact water resources through unsustainable withdrawals, namely water withdrawal happens at faster rates than natural resources renewability. Locally, this may generate water stress situations: a strong pressure on the hydrological cycle occurs for which depletion of the resources is determined. Here's how we proposed to measure these impacts.
READ MORECorollary research is necessary to define methodologies and disentangle dynamics of complex phenomena in nature and society. Here, we collect the corollary work that helped us build the research's main outputs on the water-food nexus.
READ MOREHow much water is the world consuming for food today?
28,422 km3
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