Increasingly erratic rainfall patterns related to climate change pose a major threat to food security and economic growth, water experts said yesterday, arguing for greater investment in water storage.
In a report by the International Water Management Institute, experts said Africa and Asia were likely to be hardest hit by unpredictable rainfall, and urged policymakers and farmers to try to find ways of diversifying sources of water.
The institute’s research estimates that up to 499 million people in Africa and India could benefit from improved agricultural water management.
“Just as modern consumers diversify their financial holdings to reduce risk, smallholder farmers need a wide array of ‘water accounts’ to provide a buffer against climate change impacts,” Matthew McCartney, a hydrologist at the institute, said in a statement.
“That way, if one water source goes dry, they’ll have others to fall back on,” he said.
The UN panel of climate experts has projected more extreme weather, such as droughts, floods and heatwaves this century, caused by global warming.
The report said that, despite a great expansion in irrigation in recent decades in Asia, about 66 percent of agriculture there is still dependent on rainfall.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion is even greater at 94 percent, it said. These are the regions where water storage infrastructure is least developed.
The report cautioned against over-reliance on single solutions, such as big dams, and said an integrated approach combining large and small-scale storage was a better strategy.
It suggested the use of water from natural wetlands, water stored in the soil, groundwater and water collected in ponds, tanks and reservoirs.
“For millions of people dependent on rain-fed agriculture, reliable access to water can make all the difference between chronic hunger and steady progress toward food security,” McCartney added. “Even small amounts of stored water, by enabling crops and livestock to survive dry periods, can produce large gains in agricultural productivity and in the wellbeing of rural people.”
The institute is funded by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a partnership of governments, donors and international organizations.
It noted that, in response to increased demand for food and power supplies, many developing country governments with fast-growing economies have recently invested in large dams.
The benefits of these projects in terms of storing water for crop irrigation were clear, it said, “but so are the adverse social and environmental impacts”.
As examples of the value of small-scale storage options, the study cited field studies that have proven the effectiveness of using small planting basins to “harvest” water.
In Zimbabwe, such basins have been shown to boost maize yields, whether rainfall is abundant or scarce. In Niger, they have led to three or four-fold increases in millet yields.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS