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7 Reasons We're Facing a Global Water Crisis

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The global water crisis can be summed up in these "seven deadly sins," from climate change to leaky infrastructure, that water researchers and officials will try to tackle during the 2017 World Water Week.

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The World’s Water Crisis Explained on World Water Day

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Many more cities than Cape Town face an uncertain future over water. But there are emerging solutions.

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Global water crisis: Facts, FAQs, and how to help

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There's nothing more essential than clean water, yet a global water crisis means people are struggling to get the quantity and quality of water they need.

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This week, Brisbane hosts the world's first conference on water scarcity and drought. Of course, access to drinking water varies considerably around the world due to natural differences in geography and climate. But there is another distinction between the water "haves" and "have nots": the role of their governments.

Much of how water is regulated is technical - whether aquifer recharge zones are protected; how to avoid leaking water pipes; whether megacities and farming communities alike can secure and manage water resources for their populations.

While the technical challenges to address water scarcity can be daunting, they are often easier to tackle than underlying issues of poor governance and inequality in access. In many parts of the world, negligence, corruption, or a lack of accountability undermine the right to water. Governments are often slow to act, unaccountable, and deny or minimise manifest harm.

Time and again, our research has shown how the poor and the marginalised are most severely affected when governments fail to do their job. A lack of legal protection disproportionately affects people who are unable to get adequate information on environmental threats and who have limited opportunity to participate meaningfully in decision-making, let alone to demand accountability and redress.

We have seen that in remote Turkana county in Kenya, where climate change and regional development projects threaten the health and livelihood of indigenous pastoralists. People living in Turkana told Human Rights Watch that they faced increased difficulty in getting water, and that many water sources had dried out, making every day a struggle for survival.

We have seen that in western Thailand, where the water in Klity Creek was contaminated by lead from a badly regulated and now defunct lead processing factory upstream. Thailand's public health and environment authorities did nothing for 17 years to prevent further lead exposure for village residents. Despite a Supreme Court order to clean up the site in 2013, Thailand's authorities have yet to begin.

We have seen that in Bangladesh, where the government is failing to adequately respond to naturally occurring arsenic in drinking water across large areas of rural Bangladesh, directly threatening the health of at least 20 million people. Government-funded deep wells can usually provide arsenic-free water even where the shallow aquifer is heavy in arsenic, but current government policy allows members of parliament to decide who gets 50 per cent of all new potentially life-saving wells. They are not going to those who need them most, but often to supporters and allies of politicians.

We have seen that in Canada, where indigenous people living on reserves do not have the same access to safe water as most other Canadians, and where dozens of communities have received government warnings of a high risk that their drinking water is contaminated in a country that has one of the largest shares of fresh water in the world.

Often, women and girls bear the brunt of scarcity. The unpaid work of providing water to households with scarce water resources disproportionately falls to women and girls. In many countries, women and girls spend 30 minutes per trip to fetch water, globally this accounts for 40 billion hours yearly of unpaid work. This is time women and girls cannot invest in school, work, or other activities.

The struggle to get clean water is often a human rights struggle. Water scarcity can often be directly traced back to government action or inaction - the absence of laws or policies addressing environmental harm, a lack of enforcement of existing laws or policies, or reinforcement of inequality through discriminatory budget allocations.

There is increasing recognition that the human right to water cannot be separated from global discussions about water scarcity and governance. The United Nations and the World Bank have convened a High-Level Panel on Water, which just released an Action Plan to help ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. In line with international law, it declares that "access to clean water and sanitation should not be a privilege for a few, but a basic human right".

Australia's recent commitments of $A100 million for water-related projects under its aid program is a key step forward in moving the action plan from words to reality. One key goal is for the funding to promote policy and regulatory reforms to deliver sustainable services. The reforms need to be made in consultation with the communities most affected by water scarcity, and governments should be prepared to enforce laws and regulations - not for the benefit of a few but to protect the rights of the many who lack safe water.
Richard Pearshouse is a senior health researcher and Amanda Klasing is a senior women's rights researcher, both at Human Rights Watch, who have done extensive research on water access and policy.

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Water 'Haves' and 'Have Nots': Why Water Scarcity is a Human Rights Issue

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This week, Brisbane hosts the world's first conference on water scarcity and drought. Of course, access to drinking water varies considerably around the world due to natural differences in geography and climate. But there is another distinction between the water "haves" and "have nots": the role of their governments.

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Call for input to a report on "Too Dirty, Too Little, Too Much: The Global Water Crisis and Human Rights"

Background

"There is simply no way to overstate the water crisis of the planet today."
Maude Barlow, former senior advisor on water to the President of the UN General Assembly

A global agreement now exists that human rights norms apply to a broad spectrum of environmental issues, including water and sanitation.

The Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, Dr. David Boyd, is working to provide additional clarity regarding the substantive rights and obligations that are essential to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment.

He has submitted reports on clean air, a safe climate, a healthy biosphere, and good practices on the promotion and implementation of the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. He is now preparing a thematic report focusing on human rights and associated obligations related to water pollution, water scarcity and floods. For that purpose, he is seeking inputs on the topic from States and stakeholders through responses to the brief questionnaire below.

Your replies will inform the Special Rapporteur's analysis and contribute to his report, which will be presented to the Human Rights Council in March 2021.

Objectives of the report/visit

A thematic report focusing on human rights and associated obligations related to water pollution, water scarcity and floods.

Key questions and types of input sought

1. Please provide examples of ways in which water pollution, water scarcity and floods are having adverse impacts on human rights. Adversely affected rights could include, among others, the rights to life, health, water and sanitation, food, culture, livelihoods, non-discrimination, a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, and indigenous peoples' rights.

2. How has climate change exacerbated water-related problems?

3. To protect a wide range of human rights, what are the specific obligations of States and responsibilities of businesses in terms of addressing water pollution, water scarcity and floods? Please provide specific examples of constitutional provisions, legislation, institutions, regulations, standards, policies and programmes that apply a rights-based approach to preventing, reducing, or eliminating water pollution, water scarcity and floods. Please include, inter alia, any instruments that refer directly to the right to a healthy environment and/or the rights to clean water and adequate sanitation.

Download the questionnaire: English | Français | Español.

How and where to submit inputs

Treatment of inputs received

Unless otherwise requested, all submissions will be made publicly available and posted on the Special Rapporteur's homepage at the OHCHR website.

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OHCHR | The Global Water Crisis and Human Rights

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"There is simply no way to overstate the water crisis of the planet today." Maude Barlow, former senior advisor on water to the President of the UN General Assembly A global agreement now exists that human rights norms apply to a broad spectrum of environmental issues, including water and sanitation.

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The Battle over Water Rights
In the West, the Oldest Claims Take Precedence

Listen to Elizabeth Arnold's report.

Aug. 28, 2003 -- Take the arid West, stir in a bunch of people with high hopes for farming and ranching and don't add water, and you end up with long-lasting and bitter disputes. As NPR's Elizabeth Arnold reports, when it comes to water, the law of the West is simple and unforgiving: the first one to use it gets it.

This doctrine, known as "prior appropriation," originated during the California Gold Rush days, with miners who needed water for their placer operations on public lands. They adopted the same rule for water as they did for minerals: "first in time, first in right."

To this day, prior appropriation governs water in nine Western states. David Getches, dean of the University of Colorado law school, says the doctrine has created an unruly situation.

"It's the same justice we think about when somebody wants to crowd in front of us in line," Getches says. "It didn't take into account who may have a more valuable use, or a use for water that society thinks is more or less important, or even damaging."

The complicated and often emotional legal contests that prior appropriation creates are evident along the Musselshell River, a 500-mile-long stream in eastern Montana that, in a good year, reaches the Missouri River at its confluence. According to Richard VanCampen, the chief water commissioner on the Musselshell Enforcement Project, the good years are rare.

"Presently, there's not enough water in the river to even supply the users on the river, let alone downstream states," VanCampen says. "For 45 days, there's been no water flowing through the system that reaches the end of the river. It's all been used up by those with the most senior rights, those that go back to 1875."

VanCampen is a water cop; his job is to make sure those who have the most senior right to what little water flows down the Musselshell River get it, no matter where they are on the river. Last year, VanCampen caught one rancher illegally trying to irrigate his parched fields. The rancher's water right dated back to 1900, but only those with rights dating to 1883 or before had priority access to water at the time.

"It's a lesson hard learned, but it's a lesson that everybody needs to understand," VanCampen says.

Along the Musselshell, it's easy to see who has the best claims. While the tiny hamlet of Harlowtown rations water for gardening and car washing, a rancher high above the river bottom maintains a lush crop of alfalfa with endless pipes and sprinklers.

"It doesn't make for good neighbors," Arnold says. "Farms and friendships have been lost over water rights, and the tension it creates is more real than in any Hollywood Western."

Legal experts say water law has evolved somewhat to accommodate needs that were not foreseen when the doctrine of prior appropriation was shaped. For example, claims on water for recreational, environmental and urban uses are recognized, but only as junior rights. Ultimately, senior water rights trump all.

"This is a struggle in this country in all kinds of ways," says attorney Bill Swan, who has wrestled with water rights for three decades. "Somebody has a right to something, and we say, 'Can't we share that?' But in a recent decision of the California Supreme Court, in a case that came to a head over a region in the Mojave Valley, the court unanimously held that the senior water right had to be respected. So this notion that we are somehow going to share these early vested property rights did not go very far."

And that leads to a problem that the prior appropriation doctrine doesn't address: In the rush to claim water rights, there was never a consideration that, one day, there might not be enough to go around.

In Depth

Aug. 26, 2003: NPR's Howard Berkes reports on 19th-century explorer John Welsey Powell's vision for for governing water rights in the West.

Aug. 27, 2003: NPR's Elizabeth Arnold reports on the history of the Colorado River and the competing demands on its water.

Other Resources

Musselshell River Enforcement Project

A brief explanation of Western water law as applied in Montana

An explanation of the prior appropriation doctrine, from the Center for Environmental Education at Washington State University

FindLaw.com offers a description of water law.

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all things considered series on water issues

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NPR : The Battle over Water Rights, Water in the West

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The Battle over Water Rights In the West, the Oldest Claims Take Precedence Listen to Elizabeth Arnold's report. Aug. 28, 2003 -- Take the arid West, stir in a bunch of people with high hopes for farming and ranching and don't add water, and you end up with long-lasting and bitter disputes.

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One of our most popular events, our annual Water 101 Workshop details the history, geography, legal and political facets of water in California as well as hot topics currently facing the state.

Taught by some of the leading policy and legal experts in the state, the one-day workshop on Feb. 7 gave attendees a deeper understanding of the state's most precious natural resources.

Optional Groundwater Tour

On Feb. 8, we jumped aboard a bus to explore groundwater, a key resource in California. Led by Foundation staff and groundwater experts Thomas Harter and Carl Hauge, retired DWR chief hydrogeologist, the tour visited cities and farms using groundwater, examined a subsidence measuring station and provided the latest updates on the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.

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Water Rights - Water Education Foundation

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One of our most popular events, our annual Water 101 Workshop details the history, geography, legal and political facets of water in California as well as hot topics currently facing the state. Taught by some of the leading policy and legal experts in the state, the one-day workshop on Feb.

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Food insecurity has been increasing in recent years, and has been further exacerbated in 2020 by the coronavirus. But what can we expect for the next decade? What will current trends in climate change, economic growth, and demographic shifts mean for food security throughout the 2020s? With data from the Food and Agriculture Organization in partnership with Gallup World Poll, the World Data Lab has used machine learning techniques and the latest forecasts of global change to estimate the dynamics of food insecurity for the coming decade. This forecast is displayed at subnational spatial resolution on the World Hunger Clock, allowing policymakers to explore the data and answer important questions about hunger.

Scientists have been studying food security for decades, and for many years, they relied on crude metrics, such as food available per capita, or the rate of stunting among children. However, these methods come with a variety of problems. Looking at the amount of food stored in national reserves does not account for inequalities in access to that food, while population level metrics like rates of stunting are confounded by things like infectious disease and parasites.

Today, scientists use a new metric called the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, which measures people's lived experiences of hunger, rather than just crude proxies for hunger. It involves questions about skipping meals, running out of food, and worrying about having enough to eat over the previous year. As one of the most informative and cross-culturally valid metrics of food insecurity, it was selected as one of the key indicators for the second Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger. Now, with the World Hunger Clock, it is possible to explore this important metric at high spatial resolution including projections into the future for the entire world.

To map world hunger, we trained a machine learning model with the best data available today on variables like wealth, education, demographics, urbanization, and the climate. Our model was able to predict recent historic rates of food insecurity with very high accuracy. Then, based on how those variables are likely to change in the coming years, we estimated rates of food insecurity in the future.

We used our model to predict both moderate food insecurity-eating less than you would like, as well as severe food insecurity-going an entire day without eating. The figure below shows our results aggregated for the whole world. In recent years, our model confirms that both moderate and severe food insecurity have been on the rise in terms of absolute numbers. Due to the impact of the coronavirus on the global food system, 2020 and 2021 will see the highest levels of hunger in over a decade. Today, nearly 2.5 billion people-almost one-third of the world's population-have some level of hunger, due to lacking the resources to purchase the food they would like, while 800,000 people are severely food insecure, going entire days without eating at least once.

Figure 1. Hunger is declining but very slowly

Number of people with moderate and severe food insecurity
Source: World Data Lab, World Hunger Clock
Breaking down our model's predictions by world region shows a dynamic picture. East Asia has been continuing a pattern of increasing development and access to food, so the number of food insecure people has decreased and will continue to do so. Not only are people leaving a state of food insecurity and poverty, but people are achieving a middle-class lifestyle. Increasingly, the challenge people and policymakers face in this region is not the challenge of eating enough but rather eating well-having diets that do not lead to obesity and that do not have an excessive impact on the environment.

In sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, the number of food insecure will continue to rise. While economic development will continue rapidly, in many parts of Africa, population growth will outpace the improvements in food security. Many lower-middle-income African countries will make large strides in decreasing the rate of food security, particularly Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia, but in absolute numbers, food insecurity will continue to increase throughout the continent.

Finally, South Asia is predicted to turn a corner on food insecurity. Having seen the number of hungry people increase throughout the last decade, the number of both moderate and severely food insecure people will begin to decrease in the early 2020s. This is due to a combination of economic growth bringing people out of poverty as well as the fruits of long-term trends in reduced stunting and malnutrition.

As the recent well-deserved Nobel Peace Price received by the World Food Programme shows, ensuring that all people on earth have access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food is an important goal to strive for, and many organizations are currently paying attention to global hunger. The novel World Hunger Clock will contribute to global efforts to achieve this goal and help policymakers to better understand where hunger still exists and how it is changing.
Disclaimer: The World Hunger Clock is supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

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Food insecurity has been increasing in recent years, and has been further exacerbated in 2020 by the coronavirus. But what can we expect for the next decade? What will current trends in climate change, economic growth, and demographic shifts mean for food security throughout the 2020s?

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Credit... Golden Cosmos

It's been 50 years since President John F. Kennedy spoke of ending world hunger, yet on the eve of World Food Day, Oct. 16, the situation remains dire. The question "How will we feed the world?" implies that we have no choice but to intensify industrial agriculture, with more high-tech seeds, chemicals and collateral damage. Yet there are other, better options.

Something approaching a billion people are hungry, a number that's been fairly stable for more than 50 years, although it has declined as a percentage of the total population.

"Feeding the world" might as well be a marketing slogan for Big Ag, a euphemism for "Let's ramp up sales," as if producing more cars would guarantee that everyone had one. But if it worked that way, surely the rate of hunger in the United States would not be the highest percentage of any developed nation, a rate closer to that of Indonesia than of Britain.

The world has long produced enough calories, around 2,700 per day per human, more than enough to meet the United Nations projection of a population of nine billion in 2050, up from the current seven billion. There are hungry people not because food is lacking, but because not all of those calories go to feed humans (a third go to feed animals, nearly 5 percent are used to produce biofuels, and as much as a third is wasted, all along the food chain).

The current system is neither environmentally nor economically sustainable, dependent as it is on fossil fuels and routinely resulting in environmental damage. It's geared to letting the half of the planet with money eat well while everyone else scrambles to eat as cheaply as possible.

While a billion people are hungry, about three billion people are not eating well, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, if you count obese and overweight people alongside those with micronutrient deficiencies. Paradoxically, as increasing numbers of people can afford to eat well, food for the poor will become scarcer, because demand for animal products will surge, and they require more resources like grain to produce. A global population growth of less than 30 percent is projected to double the demand for animal products. But there is not the land, water or fertilizer - let alone the health care funding - for the world to consume Western levels of meat.

If we want to ensure that poor people eat and also do a better job than "modern" farming does at preserving the earth's health and productivity, we must stop assuming that the industrial model of food production and its accompanying disease-producing diet is both inevitable and desirable. I have dozens of friends and colleagues who say things like, "I hate industrial ag, but how will we feed the poor?"

Let's at last recognize that there are two food systems, one industrial and one of small landholders, or peasants if you prefer. The peasant system is not only here for good, it's arguably more efficient than the industrial model. According to the ETC Group, a research and advocacy organization based in Ottawa, the industrial food chain uses 70 percent of agricultural resources to provide 30 percent of the world's food, whereas what ETC calls "the peasant food web" produces the remaining 70 percent using only 30 percent of the resources.

Yes, it is true that high-yielding varieties of any major commercial monoculture crop will produce more per acre than peasant-bred varieties of the same crop. But by diversifying crops, mixing plants and animals, planting trees - which provide not only fruit but shelter for birds, shade, fertility through nutrient recycling, and more - small landholders can produce more food (and more kinds of food) with fewer resources and lower transportation costs (which means a lower carbon footprint), while providing greater food security, maintaining greater biodiversity, and even better withstanding the effects of climate change. (Not only that: their techniques have been demonstrated to be effective on larger-scale farms, even in the Corn Belt of the United States.) And all of this without the level of subsidies and other support that industrial agriculture has received in the last half-century, and despite the efforts of Big Ag to become even more dominant.

In fact if you define "productivity" not as pounds per acre but as the number of people fed per that same area, you find that the United States ranks behind both China and India (and indeed the world average), and roughly the same as Bangladesh, because so much of what we grow goes to animals and biofuels. (Regardless of how food is produced, delivered and consumed, waste remains at about one third.) Thus, as the ETC's research director, Kathy Jo Wetter, says, "It would be lunacy to hold that the current production paradigm based on multinational agribusiness is the only credible starting point for achieving food security." This is especially true given all of its downsides.

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Mark Bittman Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

As Raj Patel, a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, puts it, "The playing field has been tilted against peasants for centuries, and they've still managed to feed more people than industrial agriculture. With the right kinds of agroecological training and the freedom to shape the food system on fair terms, it's a safe bet that they'll be able to feed themselves, and others as well."

Yet obviously not all poor people feed themselves well, because they lack the essentials: land, water, energy and nutrients. Often that's a result of cruel dictatorship (North Korea) or war, displacement and strife (the Horn of Africa, Haiti and many other places), or drought or other calamities. But it can also be an intentional and direct result of land and food speculation and land and water grabs, which make it impossible for peasants to remain in their home villages. (Governments of many developing countries may also act as agents for industrial agriculture, seeing peasant farming as "inefficient.")

The result is forced flight to cities, where peasants become poorly paid laborers, enter the cash market for (increasingly mass produced) food, and eat worse. (They're no longer "peasants," at this point, but more akin to the working poor of the United States, who also often cannot afford to eat well, though not to the point of starvation.) It's a formula for making not only hunger but obesity: remove the ability to produce food, then remove the ability to pay for food, or replace it with only one choice: bad food.

It's not news that the poor need money and justice. If there's a bright side here, it's that the changes required to "fix" the problems created by "industrial agriculture" are perhaps more tractable than those created by inequality.

We might begin by ditching the narrow focus on yields (as Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, says, "It's not 'grow baby grow' "), which seem to be ebbing naturally as land quality deteriorates and chemicals become less effective (despite high-tech "advances" like genetically engineered crops). Better, it would seem, would be to ask not how much food is produced, but how it's produced, for whom, at what price, cost and benefit.

We also need to see more investment in researching the benefits of traditional farming. Even though simple techniques like those mentioned above give measurably excellent results, because they're traditional - even ancient - "technologies," and because their benefits in profiting multinationals or international trade are limited, they've never received investment on the same scale as corporate agriculture. (It's impossible not to point out here that a similar situation exists between highly subsidized and damaging fossil fuels and oft-ignored yet environmentally friendly renewables.)

Instead, the money and energy (of all kinds) focused on boosting supply cannot be overstated. If equal resources were put into reducing waste - which aside from its obvious merits would vastly prevent the corresponding greenhouse gas emissions - questioning the value of animal products, reducing overconsumption (where "waste" becomes "waist"), actively promoting saner, less energy-consuming alternatives, and granting that peasants have the right to farm their traditional landholdings, we could not only ensure that people could feed themselves but also reduce agriculture's contribution to greenhouse gases, chronic disease and energy depletion.

This isn't about "organic" versus "modern." It's about supporting the system in which small producers make decisions based on their knowledge and experience of their farms in the landscape, as opposed to buying standardized technological fixes in a bag. Some people call this knowledge-based rather than energy-based agriculture, but obviously it takes plenty of energy; as it happens, much of that energy is human, which can be a good thing. Frances Moore Lappé, author of "Diet for a Small Planet," calls it "relational," and says, "Agroecology is not just healthy sustainable food production but the seed of a different way of relating to one another, and to the earth."

That may sound new age-y, but so be it; all kinds of questions and all kinds of theories are needed if we're going to produce food sustainably. Supporting, or at least not obstructing, peasant farming is one key factor, but the other is reining in Western-style monoculture and the standard American diet it creates.

Some experts are at least marginally optimistic about the second half of this: "The trick is to find the sweet spot," says Mr. Foley of the University of Minnesota, "between better nutrition and eating too much meat and junk. The optimistic view is to hope that the conversation about what's wrong with our diet may deflect some of this. Eating more meat is voluntary, and how the Chinese middle class winds up eating will determine a great deal." Of course, at the moment, that middle class shows every indication that it's moving in the wrong direction; China is the world's leading consumer of meat, a trend that isn't slowing.

But if the standard American diet represents the low point of eating, a question is whether the developing world, as it hurtles toward that nutritional nadir - the polar opposite of hunger, but almost as deadly - can see its destructive nature and pull out of the dive before its diet crashes. Because "solving" hunger by driving people into cities to take low-paying jobs so they can buy burgers and fries is hardly a desirable outcome.
Mark Bittman is a food journalist, author and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

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Opinion | How to Feed the World (Published 2013)

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It's been 50 years since President John F. Kennedy spoke of ending world hunger, yet on the eve of World Food Day, Oct. 16, the situation remains dire. The question "How will we feed the world?" implies that we have no choice but to intensify industrial agriculture, with more high-tech seeds, chemicals and collateral damage.

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Feeding the world

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Why do we need to grow more food?

Food production around the world must rise by half in the next 30 years to sustain a global population expected to top 10 billion by 2050.

Compared with 2010, an extra 7,400tn calories will be needed a year in 2050. If food production increases along current lines, that would require a landmass twice the area of India.

These are the findings of a report published in December by the World Resources Institute on the "food gap" between current production and growing consumption.

So we need to find more land to cultivate then?

Bringing more land under agricultural production is one answer to filling this gap, but it cannot solve the problem alone. Finding that amount of land in suitable conditions would spell the end for many of the earth's remaining forests, peatlands and wild areas, and release the carbon stored in them, hastening climate change.

Intensive farming has already had a huge effect on biodiversity and the environment worldwide. Pesticides, which have helped boost cereal and fruit production, have also killed bees and myriad species of insects in large numbers.

Fertilisers that have improved poor soils have also had unintended harmful consequences. The largest ever maritime "dead zone" was discovered in the Gulf of Mexico last year, the result of fertiliser and manure from the meat industry running off the land. Chemical fertilisers also contribute directly to climate change, through the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, and to air pollution through ammonia.

Chinese farm workers sort out leeks at an organic farm on the outskirts of Beijing. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP

So what are the other answers?

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world's leading body charged with care of our future food supply, has called this year for "transformative change in our food systems".

The most obvious alternative to industrialised intensive farming in the developed world is organic farming. The label organic, or bio, is a familiar one in many supermarkets, but makes up only 2% of food sales in the UK and about 5.5% in the US.

Organic farmers must adhere to strict rules on how they grow their crops and raise their livestock. These include using antibiotics on animals only when necessary, cutting out chemical fertilisers and pesticides almost completely in favour of natural alternatives such as manure and wood ash as fertilisers and plant-derived pesticides, and managing land to provide habitats for wildlife.

Rob Percival, head of policy at the Soil Association, says organic farming can feed the world, if consumption patterns are adjusted to encourage those who can afford meat to eat less of it. "We need an urgent shift in both production and consumption if we're to avert the worst consequences of climate change, including a dietary shift towards less and better meat," he says.

"Livestock grazing on pasture can support soil health and carbon sequestration, and manure can provide soil fertility for other crops."

He adds that the productivity of organic farming is greater than previously thought, "and when the environmental and other damage caused by high energy and chemical inputs in non-organic farming are factored in, organic food is cheaper for society and better for the planet".

A march for agroecology and civil resistance against seed and pesticide maker Monsanto in Bordeaux, France. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images

But isn't organic a burden for farmers?

For many farmers, the investment and time needed to meet organic standards may be a stretch, but there are ways to move towards more sustainable farming without organic certification.

Agroecology is the name given to a broad range of farming techniques that seek to minimise the environmental impact of farming. It encompasses organic farming, but is informal and does not require certification and inspection.

"It is about using natural systems," says Vicki Hird, food and farming campaigner at Sustain, an NGO. "Reducing the use of artificial chemicals, such as fertilisers and pesticides is an important part of it. Looking closely at the soil and other conditions, nourishing the soil, taking account of the natural pest cycles, natural predators and crop cycles."

She argues that agroecology could be widely adopted as an alternative to damaging industrialised farming. Farmers can sow crops such as clover as cover to suppress weeds and return organic matter to the soil, and rotate crops, including vegetables such as legumes that fix nitrogen. It requires close attention to the land itself and the crops, rather than the standard mode of farming which is to plant cash crops at the highest yield possible.

"Diversity is the key," says Hird. "Having these huge monocultures does not lend itself to being managed in a natural way, and can damage biodiversity."

Diversifying into heritage crops, such as older varieties of fruit and vegetables and a wider variety of grains than the current few strains of wheat that are the norm in intensive agriculture, can also yield benefits. These crops have their own advantages, including natural resistance to certain diseases, pests or conditions.

"You might get a lower yield [by these methods]," Hird concedes, "but you get a higher level of nutrients in the food produced."

What about permaculture?

Some farmers go further, and embrace concepts such as permaculture and biodynamics. The principles of permaculture involve understanding the relationships between plants and using them in combinations, while reusing any waste products, often as fertiliser.

Biodynamics takes a different approach, following the precepts of Rudolf Steiner and incorporating a spiritual aspect, for instance in some cases aligning planting and harvesting to lunar calendars.

Peatlands, which around the world have been grossly degraded, can also be managed organically through paludiculture. This requires re-wetting dried-out peatlands and looking to alternative plants that grow well there, including forestry and medicinal plants such as sphagnum moss, and allowing animals to graze.

Urban farming, shown here in Nairobi, Kenya, produces a fifth of the world's food. Photograph: Luis Tato/The Guardian

And urban farming?

Urban farming can deliver food - or at least some fresh produce - efficiently to dense populations without the greenhouse gas emissions and nutrient loss associated with transporting it across long distances. Already, urban farming produces about a fifth of the world's food.

There are currently more than 3,000 urban farming schemes in London alone. These carry an echo of the "market gardens" and dairies of the Victorian era, when small vegetable farms were sited in or near towns and cows were kept in green places in cities for fresh milk.

The cows of Hyde Park, dispensing fresh milk to Londoners, were a familiar sight until the first world war; in the near future, look out for hipsters drinking smoothies from the underground farms of Shoreditch.

These sound a bit niche. Don't industrial farms produce most of the world's food?

No. There are more than 570m farms worldwide; more than 90% are run by an individual or family and rely primarily on family labour. They produce about 80% of the world's food.

Small farmers will be key to the transition, says Ronald Vargas, soil and land officer at the FAO. Many small farmers are poor and insecure, but FAO considers investment in smallholder production "the most urgent and secure and promising means of combating hunger and malnutrition, while minimising the ecological impact of agriculture".

A weeding robot at an agricultural research organisation in Saint-Hilaire-en-Woevre, eastern France. ¨ Photograph: Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP/Getty Images

How can technology and innovation help?

There is no shortage of innovation and tech to help improve efficiencies and yields - on industrial farms and smallholdings. GPS, drones and fine-grained data on topography, soils and other aspects of farmland to allow farmers to target specific areas with fertilisers, pesticides and water, instead of blanket spraying.

For instance, Olam, a global agribusiness that produces cocoa, coffee, sugar, cotton and other crops, uses real-time monitoring on its plantations to finely judge fertiliser quantities and avoid the need for the pre-emptive use of pesticides. Its almond trees in Australia are fitted with sensors to monitor exactly how much water each tree needs, and when.

For family farmers in the developing world, mobile phones are revolutionising what is possible. They have given farmers in remote areas access to tools such as weather forecasts, market prices, yield information and practical advice. GPS is also allowing them to track their produce after it leaves the farm.

Drones and robots may seem futuristic but are already in use, delivering targeted pesticides and picking out damaged or diseased crops before they can infect others around them.

In parts of the world where space is at a premium, vertical farming is catching on. This refers to the practice of stacking crops, usually vegetables, in shallow containers in layers, which can reach any height available. It not only saves on space, but can also be managed to use water and energy more efficiently, as water can be pumped to the top and allowed to flow down by gravity.

Some systems use hydroponics, by which the plants are immersed in water containing mineral solutions, in place of soil. Temperatures can be carefully controlled, water reused, and nutrients recycled. Software systems can control the delivery mechanisms and monitor how the plants are faring.

Our new-found abilities to control light, temperature, air and other environmental factors open up new vistas for farming. Underground growing used to be reserved for mushrooms and niche crops such as forced rhubarb, grown in large warehouses.

If LEDs can take the place of sunlight, a far greater variety of plants can thrive in these conditions, making not only rooftops but basements and disused underground spaces from worked-out mines to old railway lines potentially viable venues for growing short-cycle foodstuffs.

What next?

Our reliance on artificial fertiliser and intensive farming techniques did not happen overnight, but took decades. Along the way, these methods revolutionised farming and enabled huge population growth and economic growth. We now have a wealth of scientific evidence that shows that continuing down the same path would risk runaway climate change, the extinction of species vital to human life, pollution of our water and air, and the death of our soils.

"Industrial agriculture exploits the available natural resources of our planet to an untenable and unsustainable extent," says Vargas of the FAO. "The basic strategy to replace human labour with farm machinery, agrochemicals and fossil energy is a dead end in times of climate change, dwindling oil reserves and over-exploited natural resources."

Experts say a second revolution is now needed, that will encompass not just our growing methods but consumption habits and our entire food economy. This would have to involve farmers, retailers, governments and consumers. In last century's farming revolution, only one future was offered: industrialisation. For this century, there will be a plurality of alternatives, and combinations of new and ancient technology, and all have their place.

"There is not one huge conceptual change where you do everything differently and everything will be OK," says Tim Searchinger of Princeton University and the World Resources Institute. "There is not one single answer. There are lots and lots of things we can and need to do."

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How to feed the world - without killing everything

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From urban farming to drones, innovation can help fill the gap between production and consumption

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When we think about threats to the environment, we tend to picture cars and smokestacks, not dinner. But the truth is, our need for food poses one of the biggest dangers to the planet.

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Soil... it's one the most underrated, and little-understood, wonders on our fragile planet. Here's why... SOIL... THE WONDER STUFF BENEATH YOUR FEET. BRIDGET EMMETT, SOIL SCIENTIST UK CENTRE FOR ECOLOGY & HYDROLOGY Far from being lifeless dirt, it's estimated that in a single gram of soil, there could be as many as 50,000 species of microscopic organisms, or microorganisms. And in one teaspoon of soil, there are more microorganisms than there are people on the Earth. But much of what lies beneath, in this hidden and deep universe, is still alien to us. Despite being literally under our feet, humans have so far only identified a tiny fraction of the extraordinary life teeming underground. But these animals and microorganisms perform an invaluable role. Millions of years of evolutionary competition have led the microorganisms to produce antibiotic compounds to fight their neighbours. And these compounds form the basis of many of the antibiotics used by us humans. We literally make medicine from our soil. No-one knows how many new treatments could be lying under our feet, waiting to be discovered. One of the most special creatures living in soil is the earthworm. Darwin was fascinated by them and said: "It may be doubted if there are any other animals which have played such an important part in the history of the world," due to their importance in making and sustaining soil. Earthworms journey down and around, creating breathing holes, like lungs in the soil. This creates space for plant roots to grow and keeps soil alive. Under the soil, there are also vast and intricate webs of fungal threads. Plants and fungi need each other to thrive, and so they do a deal... Fungi can't capture carbon dioxide to grow like plants can, but they're better than plants at mining the soil for nutrients, so they trade. Plants give fungi carbon to grow, and fungi give plants nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. It's a mutually beneficial relationship. And just one example of the interconnected ecosystem we're all part of. Plant matter decays and provides food for microbes. They provide food for worms. Worms are food for birds and so on... Soil provides us humans with almost everything we eat. But it's not just about what soils can do for us. It's important we value, appreciate - and crucially protect - soil for a whole load of other reasons too. Think about this for a moment. It takes more than 100 years to build just 5 millimetres - half a centimetre - of soil. But just moments to destroy, through chemical contamination, urbanisation, landslides, erosion and more. Some soil is really ancient - dating back millions and millions of years. The oldest soil on Earth is thought to be in South Africa and dates back three billion years. In the UK, our soil is around 15,000 years old, and it formed after the last ice age. Soil is also a really valuable carbon store - capturing carbon and locking it away in stable forms deep underground. It stores three times as much carbon as all the plants on Earth combined, including trees. But because it grows so slowly, we need to protect what we have. We are not succeeding. We know many of the problems. Intensive farming is one of them. It releases carbon from our soils. And we're losing soil 50 to 100 times faster than it's able to re-build. In Europe, 60-70% of soils are thought to be unhealthy. And in croplands in the UK, in less than 30 years - from the end of the 1970s - we lost more than 10% of the carbon the soil had stored for us. And since then? Well, we just don't know, because in many countries there's little data on soil. It's poorly protected and regulated. We grow on it, build on it, build from it. It filters and cleans our waters, reduces flooding, and regulates our atmosphere. It's one of the most biodiverse habitats on Earth, and a vital part of the nitrogen and carbon cycle on our planet. But the sad truth is, right now, soil hasn't enough champions fighting for it. We literally treat it like dirt. And yet there is so much untapped potential, so much wonder, and so many secrets, just waiting to be discovered... in the ground beneath our feet.

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Why soil is one of the most amazing things on Earth - BBC Ideas

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Soil... it's one the most underrated, and little-understood, wonders on our fragile planet. Here's why... SOIL... THE WONDER STUFF BENEATH YOUR FEET. BRIDGET EMMETT, SOIL SCIENTIST UK CENTRE FOR ECOLOGY & HYDROLOGY Far from being lifeless dirt, it's estimated that in a single gram of soil, there could be as many as 50,000 species of microscopic organisms, or microorganisms. And in one teaspoon of soil, there are more microorganisms than there are people on the Earth.