Feeding the World: The Challenge of Energy for Food Security

This article by Helena Wright, Imperial College London is part of the Wikiprogress Environment Series.

Back in 2008, business leaders at the World Economic Forum raised a call for awareness of the nexus between water, food and energy security, as well as climate change.  They realised that there is a serious water crisis ahead, as many groundwater resources are depleted, while demand for food and energy is increasing.  By 2030, the world’s population and economic growth are expected to lead to a 40% increase in energy and water demand, and a 50% increase in food demand.  Meanwhile, climate change puts additional strain on agriculture.

Energy is crucial for production and transport of food, from the ‘farm to fork’.  The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the UN estimates the food sector currently accounts for around 30% of the world’s total energy consumption and over 20% of greenhouse gas emissions.

As illustrated in the graph below, the increases in food prices of recent years have been closely linked to rising energy and oil prices, with serious economic implications. The poor are particularly affected by high food prices as they spend a high proportion of income on food. Worryingly, the triple food, fuel and financial crisis of recent years may be a taste of things to come.

Global agriculture is highly dependent on energy from fossil fuel-burning for many processes, from on-farm mechanisation, to fertiliser production, to food processing and transportation. The price of oil is also closely correlated with the price of fertiliser.

The emerging biofuel market increases interdependencies between food and energy prices, since feed and fodder commodities are being used for biofuel, and also because a higher oil price increases demand for biofuel. The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) has found that growing bio-fuels from crops is extremely water-intensive, as well as being a practice which puts pressure on food crops.  According to the FAO, it takes 2,500 litres of water to produce one litre of biofuel for transportation. New legislation may be needed to address the impact of biofuel mandates on food and water security.

Energy and water are both absolutely essential for food.  This is especially true because irrigation is used for the production of roughly 40% of global food.  In this way, agriculture accounts for about 70% of all freshwater withdrawal.  Inefficiency in one area can also lead to inefficiency in another. For example, subsidised electricity for irrigation can lead to over-pumping, which contributes to groundwater depletion. Where water is extremely scarce, desalination – which is highly energy-intensive – is used.

As conventional fossil-fuel sources become depleted, we have seen a shift to processes like hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) which are even more water-intensive.  Extraction and processing of oil sands uses about 100-1000 litres of water per gigajoule (GJ), compared to 10-100 litres for conventional oil and gas. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), 79% of new planned power capacity in India will be built in water-stressed areas. Use of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology also increases water consumption.

Renewable energy has brought new challenges.  Hydropower, already the world’s dominant source of renewable energy, is a prime example of a technology that must be carefully managed to avoid negative impacts.   Dams can affect biodiversity, fish migration and have impacts on downstream food security.  It is clear we must start to think about the ‘water productivity’ of energy.  Solar power, for example, hardly uses any water.

In the long-term, it will be necessary for our food to be produced using sustainable energy resources and this is likely to require a transformation in agricultural systems.  At the moment, we are seeing the opposite occur: food crops such as maize and soy are being used to fuel energy-consuming transport. This issue must be tackled. Otherwise, there is a risk food prices will continue to sky-rocket.

Research is only just beginning to explore the complex issues in the food-energy-water nexus. What is clear is that better collaboration is needed between different sectors. Policy-makers must ensure that expansion of certain types of energy does not put a strain on other vital resources.

At the UN climate talks in Doha last month, it was evident that policy-makers often work in silos – for instance, there can be little cooperation between those working on reducing emissions and those on adapting to climate change.  This may have led to the controversial issues created by biofuel expansion.   It is clear a more holistic outlook is needed in tackling these problems and managing increasing demands for energy, water and food.

This article first appeared in the Outreach Magazine 

Renewable Energy : Why the Definition Needs to be Revised

This article by Almuth Ernsting, European Focal Point of the Global Forest Coalition and Co-director of Biofuelwatch is part of the Wikiprogress Environment Series.

Climate change mitigation and sustainability are the key rationales for increasing the share of renewable energy.  Yet definitions of renewable energy used by policy-makers are so broad that subsidy regimes and other policies to promote renewable energy are able to result in highly negative climate, environmental and human impacts. 

According to the International Energy Agency, renewable energy is “derived from natural processes…that are replenished at a faster rate than they are consumed”.  In reality, North America’s and Europe’s renewable energy policies are heavily focused on large-scale wood combustion for electricity and heat – which depends on increased logging and the expansion of monoculture tree plantations – and on greater use of transport biofuels. 

The fact that soils, freshwater, and ecosystems are being destroyed rather than replenished in this process is ignored. Also overlooked is the growing volume of evidence that industrial bioenergy – both biomass combustion and transport biofuels – commonly cause more greenhouse gas emissions than the fossil fuels they might replace. A growing volume of peer-reviewed studies documents the scale of those emissions, which result from indirect land-use change, increased fertiliser use and other causes.

In the US, bioenergy accounts for 44% of all energy classed as renewable – more than any other technology.  The US Energy Information Administration expects its share to grow much faster than that of the renewables sector overall until 2040.  In Canada, the share of bioenergy amongst ‘renewables’ is surpassed only by that of large-scale hydropower.

In the EU, according to Member States’ 2010 renewable energy plans, bioenergy would have a 54.5% share of the 2020 renewable energy target. Most of this would come from burning 80-100 million tonnes of wood a year.  This is likely to be an underestimate:  in the UK alone, companies have announced power station plans which would require around 90 million tonnes of wood annually – nine times as much as the country produces.

The result of these ‘renewable energy policies’ is a massively increased demand for wood, vegetable oil, cereals and, crucially, for land.  Biofuels still only account for 3% of global transport fuel, yet, according to a report by the International Land Coalition, they were responsible for 59% of all land-grabs between 2000 and 2010.  By pushing up the price of cereals and vegetable oils, they have led both to greater hunger and malnutrition, and to the increased destruction of forests and other ecosystems – including peatlands – for palm oil, soy and other plantations. 

Those impacts are being intensified with the rush towards industrial wood-based bioenergy. In the longer term, industry and governments expect much of the wood for EU power stations to come from new tree plantations in South America and Africa, threatening yet more land-grabs and ecosystem destruction. The demand for land for tree monocultures also exacerbates shortages of land for food production and causes rural depopulation further compromising national food sovereignty (see: http://nyti.ms/10fAGsC). Women, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists and small farmers – particularly those without formal land titles – suffer most from these land grabs and from the resulting food shortages, as well as from associated water depletion and ‘water grabs’.

In response to growing awareness of the harms resulting from bioenergy, industry and governments are developing ‘sustainability standards’.  However, these ignore the fact that deforestation and forest degradation, as well as other impacts, are primarily driven by excessive demand for wood and agricultural products.  A study published in Science projected that climate change mitigation policies, which tackle only fossil fuels and ignore the wider land-impacts of bioenergy, could lead to the destruction of all remaining forests, grasslands and most other ecosystems worldwide by 2065. Another study has shown that, even if bioenergy sustainability standards were enforced worldwide and bioenergy expansion relied on agricultural intensification, sub-Saharan Africa would lose 38% of its forests and wooded savannah and large amounts of grassland, while Latin America would lose 20% of its forests and savannah.

Given the volume of evidence of the serious negative impacts that industrial biofuels and large-scale biomass have on climate, forests, biodiversity, soil, water, and people, including them in the ‘renewable energy’ definition can no longer be justified.

Almuth Ernsting,

Almuth Ernsting is European Focal Point of the Global Forest Coalition and Co-director of Biofuelwatch.

This article first appeared in the Outreach Magazine