Food security is an essential issue for human survival and civilization. Whenever food–water security is in doubt, the community is negatively affected. Globally, Jordan is the second most water-stressed country, located in an arid, politically divided and migratory active Middle East region that lacks the access to valuable natural resources such as fertile soils. Jordan receives about 78 m3/person/year from renewable resources, which represents 1% of the world water share. Jordan’s Water Minister declared that a 50 million m3 lack of drinking water is to be faced next year; this shortage is added to the lack of irrigation water, which yields food insecurity and food price fluctuations that wear out the consumer. The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive overview of the impact of agricultural cropping patterns and water security by analyzing the most relevant national databases. The study results will contribute to the development of national policy in order to strategize the aid programs and adaptation measures for more sustainable planning in the Jordanian agri-food sector.

There are increasing concerns for the promising future of atmospheric water harvesters (AWH). AWH have been analysed theoretically and experimentally using different technologies such as Vapour Compression (VC) Thermoelectric (TE), Sorption (absorption, adsorption) and shape-based techniques. These techniques are suffering from low water harvesting or high energy consumption. The ammonia vapour absorption system (VAS) (which can be operated using renewable energy sources) has not yet been analysed experimentally. In this study, the AWH based on ammonia VAS has been studied experimentally, the effect of air flow velocity and ambient conditions have been analysed. The comparison between the existing techniques and VAS was performed to explore the possibility of implementing biomass, geothermal and solar energy in generating water from atmosphere, thus reducing the cost of the m 3 of water produced.

Hot water storage tanks are devices with high energy consumption, used widely in residential, industrial and commercial sectors. The hot storage tank is a key device in numerous applications such as electrical heaters, solar thermal storage, solar electrical energy production and many others. Its superior technology is favorable for the designers and has a great impact on the market competition. Hot water storage tanks were studied under continuous usage feature, for different inlet types, flow rates, thermal stratification in static and dynamic modes, both experimentally and numerically. The real discrete usage feature has not been analyzed in a proper way. In this study, the experimental and performance analyses with frequent discrete usage of the hot storage tank were performed. Different flow rates of 3, 6, and 9 l/min with 5, 10 and 20 min discrete usage waiting periods were studied. It was found that the thermocline thickness and mixing number increases for both increasing the flow rate due the increment in turbulent mixing potential and increasing the waiting period due to the increase in heat transfer time available between the hot and cold layers. The real data was drawn as is to permit further analyses and data comparison to other researchers. The effect of waiting periods can be used in solar HST to maximize the efficiency of solar collectors as the solar collector efficiency is high at low temperatures.