A new report finds that one-quarter of the world’s crops are grown in places facing high levels of water stress, water unreliability, or both. The analysis comes from the research nonprofit World Resources Institute, or WRI, and highlights the difficulty of growing enough food to meet rising demand on a warming planet.
One out of every 11 people in the world are hungry, meaning they don’t get enough food to maintain basic health, according to a recent United Nations report. The water challenges outlined in WRI’s latest research could potentially contribute to increased levels of food insecurity, especially as global temperatures continue to rise.
The report looks at both irrigated crops, in which water is transferred from reservoirs to cropland, and rain-fed crops, which receive water through precipitation. The authors relied on WRI’s existing global water risk data and compared it to crop production data from the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Analyzing both sets of data, the report authors fou... Read more
