Achieving food and environmental security: better river basin management for healthy coastal zones.

Abstract

The Millennium Development Goals call for the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger while ensuring environmental sustainability. Water is essential for food production and sanitation -key factors in poverty reduction. At the same time, it is increasingly difficult to ensure clean water to maintain ecosystem services. The challenge is to find ways of managing water in order to meet both these goals in a balanced way. This water-food-environment dilemma is exceedingly clear in the coastal zone because of increasing urban demands for water, with agriculture remaining an important component of rural livelihoods, and the dependence on water by some of the most valuable ecosystems of the world that are essential for the well-being of society.Driving forces affecting this water-food-environment nexus are increases in population and income and changing dietary patterns, which highly influence food production and water-use patterns. In response, there have been many positive trends such as overall better nutrition, an increase in overall food production and water productivity, and increased global trade in food products, thus helping in food distribution. On the other hand, there are some very disturbing trends. South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa still fall below the level required to 'lead a healthy and reproductive life' and water could be much better used for providing food security. An increased number of water bodies are becoming depleted, polluted and non-productive, negatively affecting both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.Coastal zones are particularly vulnerable as they are susceptible to rapid changes both from within the area and from outside -shock events like tsunamis plus consistent pressure from upstream water development and use. Coastal zones bear the brunt of upstream water development, reduced flows and pollution loads, yet river basin water management has been concentrated in upstream areas and very often the coastal zone is neglected or considered separately. Thus, in order to achieve and maintain healthy coastal zones, agricultural water management has to be able to respond to rapid changes from within coastal zones to maintain a balance of food, livelihood and environmental interests, and coastal zone interests must be firmly represented in overall river basin management.

A meta‐analysis of soil salinization effects on nitrogen pools, cycles and fluxes in coastal ecosystems

“…Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, all of the available studies in coastal regions have focused on natural and/or seminatural ecosystems. Thus, it remains unclear whether our current understanding of ecosystem N cycling and flux responses to soil salinization for these ecosystems (i.e., inland agro‐ecosystems and natural/seminatural coastal ecosystems) can be extrapolated to coastal agro‐ecosystems, which are also major food production areas worldwide because of the formation of soils on fertile sediments and the high availability of water (Atapattu & Molden, ). Thus, further research is needed on the responses of ecosystem N cycling and fluxes in coastal agro‐ecosystems to soil salinization because such knowledge is critical for implementing sustainable agricultural production while minimizing N pollution.…”

Transformational Adaptation in Agriculture under Climate Change: A Case Study in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka

“…The majority of wetlands in Sri Lanka are facing threats, especially those along the coastal belt (Van Zon 2004;Kotagama and Bambaradeniya 2006). It is important to realize that these issues are not brought about within the wetland itself but are due to activities in the lands adjacent to (Van Zon 2004;Kotagama and Bambaradeniya 2006) and upstream of the wetlands (Atapattu and Molden 2006;Falkenmark et al 2007), with substantial input from agricultural practices.…”