• Energy Research
• Restricted close
• 2. Zero hunger close
• AT close

The river flow regime and water resources are highly important for economic growths, flood security, and ecosystem dynamics in the Mekong basin - an important transboundary river basin in South East Asia. The river flow, although remains relatively unregulated, is expected to be increasingly perturbed by climate change and rapidly accelerating socioeconomic developments. Current understanding about hydrological changes under the combined impacts of these drivers, however, remains limited. This study presents projected hydrological changes caused by multiple drivers, namely climate change, large-scale hydropower developments, and irrigated land expansions by 2050s. We found that the future flow regime is highly susceptible to all considered drivers, shown by substantial changes in both annual and seasonal flow distribution. While hydropower developments exhibit limited impacts on annual total flows, climate change and irrigation expansions cause changes of +15% and -3% in annual flows, respectively. However, hydropower developments show the largest seasonal impacts characterized by higher dry season flows (up to +70%) and lower wet season flows (-15%). These strong seasonal impacts tend to outplay those of the other drivers, resulting in the overall hydrological change pattern of strong increases of the dry season flow (up to +160%); flow reduction in the first half of the wet season (up to -25%); and slight flow increase in the second half of the wet season (up to 40%). Furthermore, the cumulative impacts of all drivers cause substantial flow reductions during the early wet season (up to -25% in July), posing challenges for crop production and saltwater intrusion in the downstream Mekong Delta. Substantial flow changes and their consequences require careful considerations of future development activities, as well as timely adaptation to future changes.

With concerns of energy shortages, China, like the United States, European Union, and other countries, is promoting the development of biofuels. However, China also faces high future demand for food and feed, and so its bioenergy program must try to strike a balance between food and fuel. The goals of this paper are to provide an overview of China's current bioethanol program, identify the potential for using marginal lands for feedstock production, and measure the likely impacts of China's bioethanol development on the nation's future food self-sufficiency. Our results indicate that the potential to use marginal land for bioethanol feedstock production is limited. Applying a modeling approach based on highly disaggregated data by region, our analysis shows that the target of 10 million t of bioethanol by 2020 seems to be a prudent target, causing no major disturbances in China's food security. But the expansion of bioethanol may increase environmental pressures due to the higher levels of fertilizer use. This study shows also that if China were able to cultivate 45% of its required bioethanol feedstock on new marginal land, it would further limit negative effects of the bioethanol program on the domestic and international economy, but at the expense of having to apply another 750 thousand t of fertilizer.

The Indian subcontinent faces a population increase from 1.6 billion in 2000 towards 2 billion around 2050. Therefore, expansion of agricultural area combined with increases in productivity will be necessary to produce the food needed in the future. However, with pressure on water resources already being high, and potential effects of climate change still uncertain, the question rises whether there will be enough water resources available to sustain this production. The objective of this study is to make a spatially explicit quantitative analysis of water requirements and availability for current and future food production in five South Asian basins (Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Godavari and Krishna), in the absence or presence of two different adaptation strategies: an overall improvement in irrigation efficiency, and an increase of reservoir storage capacity. The analysis is performed by using the coupled hydrology and crop production model LPJmL. It is found that the Godavari and Krishna basins will benefit most from an increased storage capacity, whereas in the Ganges and the Indus water scarcity mainly takes place in areas where this additional storage would not provide additional utility. Increasing the irrigation efficiency will be beneficial in all basins, but most in the Indus and Ganges, as it decreases the pressure on groundwater resources and decreases the fraction of food production that would become at risk because of water shortage. A combination of both options seems to be the best strategy in all basins. The large-scale model used in this study is suitable to identify hotspot areas and support the first step in the policy process, but the final design and implementation of adaptation options requires supporting studies at finer scales.

AbstractThe EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED) targets, implemented to achieve climate change mitigation, affect the level of agricultural production in the EU and in the rest of the world. This article presents an impact assessment of increased biomass supply under different sustainability constraints on land use and resulting total GHG emissions at global and EU level. We apply GLOBIOM, a global partial equilibrium model integrating the agricultural, livestock, bioenergy and forestry sectors based on geographically explicit modeling of supply under prescribed demand. According to the model, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture and land‐use change (LUC) are anticipated to rise significantly up to 2030 due to various drivers (among others: GDP and population, diet shifts, and also bioenergy demand) despite basic sustainability criteria implemented by the RED (Reference scenario). Applying additional criteria, mainly protecting biodiversity outside the EU, overall GHG emissions can be reduced by 5% in 2030 compared to the Reference. Deforestation area decreases in this scenario slightly due to exclusion of high biodiversity forests but also due to increasing demand for energy wood that makes forests more valuable. If, however, in addition, deforestation is prevented through effective land‐use policies, global GHG emissions can be reduced by 20% (compared to the Reference scenario). We conclude that sustainability criteria applied to biofuel production and imports only, do not mitigate potential negative impacts on total GHG emissions effectively. Unsustainable biomass production in sectors not covered by the bioenergy criteria can be best avoided by targeting deforestation and biodiversity loss directly. © 2013 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Hunger knows no boundaries or borders. While much research has focused on undernutrition on a national scale, this report evaluates it at subnational levels for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to pinpoint hotspots where the greatest challenges exist. Undernutrition is assessed with a spatial resolution of 30 arc-minutes by investigating anthropometric data on weight and length of individuals. The impact of climate change on production of six major crops (cassava, maize, wheat, sorghum, rice and millet) is analyzed with a GIS-based Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (GEPIC) model with the same spatial resolution. Future hotspots of hunger are projected in the context of the anticipated climate, social, economic, and bio-physical changes. The results show that some regions in northern and southwestern Nigeria, Sudan and Angola with a currently high number of people with undernutrition might be able to improve their food security situation mainly through increasing purchasing power. In the near future, regions located in Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, southwestern Niger, and Madagascar are likely to remain hotspots of food insecurity, while regions located in Tanzania, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo might face more serious undernutrition. It is likely that both the groups of regions will suffer from lower capacity of importing food as well as lower per capita calorie availability, while the latter group will probably have sharper reduction in per capita calorie availability. Special attention must be paid to the hotspot areas in order to meet the hunger alleviation goals in SSA.

AbstractThe transient expression of recombinant biopharmaceutical proteins in plants can suffer inter‐batch variation, which is considered a major drawback under the strict regulatory demands imposed by current good manufacturing practice (cGMP). However, we have achieved transient expression of the monoclonal antibody 2G12 and the fluorescent marker protein DsRed in tobacco leaves with ∼15% intra‐batch coefficients of variation, which is within the range reported for transgenic plants. We developed models for the transient expression of both proteins that predicted quantitative expression levels based on five parameters: The OD600nm of Agrobacterium tumefaciens (from 0.13 to 2.00), post‐inoculation incubation temperature (15–30°C), plant age (harvest at 40 or 47 days after seeding), leaf age, and position within the leaf. The expression models were combined with a model of plant biomass distribution and extraction, generating a yield model for each target protein that could predict the amount of protein in specific leaf parts, individual leaves, groups of leaves, and whole plants. When the yield model was combined with a cost function for the production process, we were able to perform calculations to optimize process time, yield, or downstream costs. We illustrate this procedure by transferring the cost function from a production process using transgenic plants to a hypothetical process for the transient expression of 2G12. Our models allow the economic evaluation of new plant‐based production processes and provide greater insight into the parameters that affect transient protein expression in plants. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2012; 109: 2575–2588. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The close relationship between the onset and severity of agricultural and hydrological drought is considered selfevident, yet relatively few studies have addressed the effects of applying agricultural drought adaptation to hydrological drought characteristics. The present study applies a model cascade capable of simultaneously considering the interactions between agricultural and hydrological droughts. The study area covers all river basins in the Czech Republic and includes the periods of 1956-2015 (baseline) and 2021-2080 (future). The model cascade was shown to explain 91% of the variability in the seasonal and annual accumulated runoff and allows for the analysis of increasing/maintaining/decreasing available water capacity (AWC) across the 133 defined basins with a total area of c. 78,000 km2. The study reports that the probability and extent of agricultural drought increased over the entire period with higher AWC scenario showing slower pace of such increase especially from April to June. The trends in the extent or severity of hydrological droughts were of low magnitude. The future climate has been projected through the use of ensembles of five global (CMIP5) and five regional (EURO-CORDEX) climate models. The results showed a significant increase in the duration of agricultural drought stress and in the area affected throughout the year, particularly in July-September. The hydrological drought response showed a marked difference between areas with a negative and positive climatic water balance, i.e., areas where long-term reference evapotranspiration exceeds long-term precipitation (negative climatic water balance) and where it does not (positive climatic water balance). The overall results indicate that increasing soil AWC would decrease the frequency and likely also impact of future agricultural droughts, especially during spring. This result would be especially true if the wetter winters predicted by some of the models materialized. Hydrological droughts at the country level are estimated to become more pronounced with increasing AWC, particularly in catchments with a negative climatic water balance.