No abstract

While food shortage remains a big concern in many regions around the world, almost one-third of the total food production is discarded as food loss and waste (FLW). This is associated with about one-quarter of land, water, and fertilizer used for crop production, even though resources and environmental constraints are expected to limit food production around the world. FLW reduction represents a potential opportunity to enhance both food security and environmental sustainability and therefore has received considerable attention recently. By reviewing the recent progress and new developments in the literature, this paper highlights the importance of FLW prevention as a complementary solution to address the Grand Challenge of global food security and environmental sustainability. However, raising awareness only is not enough to realize the expected FLW reduction. We identify the knowledge gaps and opportunities for research by synthesizing the strategies of FLW reduction and the barriers, including (1) filling the data gaps, (2) quantifying the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of FLW reduction strategies, (3) understanding the scale effects, and (4) exploring the impacts of global transitions. It is urgent to take more aggressive yet scientifically based actions to reduce FLW, which require everyone's involvement along the food supply chain, including policy makers, food producers and suppliers, and food consumers.

The socio-hydrology community has been very successful in promoting the need for taking the human factor into account in the mainstream hydrology literature since 2012. However, the interest in studying and modeling human-water systems is not new and pre-existed the post-2012 socio-hydrology. So, it is critical to ask what socio-hydrology has been able to offer that would have been unachievable using the existing methods, tools, and analysis frameworks. Thus far, the socio-hydrology studies show a strong overlap with what has already been in the literature, especially in the water resources systems and coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) areas. Nevertheless, the work in these areas has been generally dismissed by the socio-hydrology literature. This paper overviews some of the general concerns about originality, practicality, and contributions of socio-hydrology. It is argued that while in theory, a common sense about the need for considering humans as an integral component of water resources systems models can strengthen our coupled human-water systems research, the current approaches and trends in socio-hydrology can make this interest area less inclusive and interdisciplinary.

This study provides an overview on the impacts of climate change on agricultural water management, including agricultural water requirement, water availability and water quality, and the transition of those impacts to crop yield, agricultural land suitability and livestock production systems, considering both long‐term trends of climate and extreme climatic events. A synthesis of findings from local, regional, and global studies guides this article's discussion of scientifically based information, implications for managing the risk of water scarcity and food insecurity, and future research. Negative and positive climate change impacts occurring at the local scale may counteract each other at the global scale (e.g., those on irrigation requirement and arable land availability); the impacts from the various factors can be counter‐balanced too (e.g., CO2 and water deficit impact on crop yield). Meanwhile, the shocks at the local and regional levels have been or will be caused by water quantity and quality problems and are pressing concerns for decision making. Although uncertainty in climate change predictions remains a critical issue for decision making, certain knowledge about the impact on crop production has been obtained from historical data. Finally, future research needs to focus on gaining a more detailed understanding of climate change (especially extreme events), climate change impacts, both natural and social response mechanisms, and adaptation measures of agricultural water management. More focus should be laid on improving impact assessment via the various methods such as retrospective analysis, monitoring, prediction, and strategic risk management. Moreover, planned adaptations in agricultural water management will be needed to facilitate more consistent and more effective responses to climate change, with consideration of the linkage with nonagricultural water uses. WIREs Water 2015, 2:439–455. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1089 This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Science of Water > Water and Environmental Change

This study proposes an end-to-end forecasting framework to incorporate operational seasonal climate forecasts to help farmers improve their decisions prior to the crop growth season, which are vulnerable to unanticipated drought conditions. The framework couples a crop growth model with a decisionmaking model for rainfed agriculture and translates probabilistic seasonal forecasts into more user-related information that can be used to support farmers' decisions on crop type and some market choices (e.g., contracts with ethanol refinery). The regional Climate-Weather Research and Forecasting model (CWRF) driven by two operational general circulation models (GCMs) is used to provide the seasonal forecasts of weather parameters. To better assess the developed framework, CWRF is also driven by observational reanalysis data, which theoretically can be considered as the best seasonal forecast. The proposed framework is applied to the Salt Creek watershed in Illinois that experienced an extreme drought event during 2012 crop growth season. The results show that the forecasts cannot capture the 2012 drought condition in Salt Creek and therefore the suggested decisions can make farmers worse off if the suggestions are adopted. Alternatively, the optimal decisions based on reanalysis-based CWRF forecasts, which can capture the 2012 drought conditions, make farmers better off by suggesting ''no-contract'' with ethanol refineries. This study suggests that the conventional metric used for ex ante value assessment is not capable of providing meaningful information in the case of extreme drought. Also, it is observed that institutional interventions (e.g., crop insurance) highly influences farmers' decisions and, thereby, the assessment of forecast value.