Claudia Ringler – författare

This book is the first comprehensive effort to bring together Water, Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) in a way that goes beyond the traditional focus on irrigated agriculture. Apart from looking at the role of water and sanitation for human well-being, it proposes alternative and more locally appropriate ways to address complex water management and governance challenges from the local to global levels against a backdrop of growing uncertainties.

The authors challenge mainstream supply-oriented and neo-Malthusian visions that argue for the need to increase the land area under irrigation in order to feed the world’s growing population. Instead, they argue for a reframing of the debate concerning production processes, waste, food consumption and dietary patterns whilst proposing alternative strategies to improve water and land productivity, putting the interests of marginalized and disenfranchized groups upfront.

The book highlights how accessing water for FSN can be challenging for small-holders, vulnerable and marginalized women and men, and how water allocation systems and reform processes can negatively affect local people’s informal rights. The book argues for the need to improve policy coherence across water, land and food and is original in making a case for strengthening the relationship between the human rights to water and food, especially for marginalized women and men. It will be of great interest to practitioners, students and researchers working on water and food issues.

It is beyond doubt that the interconnectedness between food, energy, water security and environmental sustainability exists and is getting amplified with increased globalization. It has been recognized that efforts to address only one part of a systemic problem by neglecting other inherently interlinked aspects may not lead to desirable and sustainable outcomes. In this perspective, policy- and decision- making requires a nexus approach that reduces trade-offs and builds synergies across sectors, and helps to reduce costs and increase benefits for humans and nature compared to independent approaches to the management of water, energy, food and the environment. In the past, work related to the Nexus has looked at the interactions between water and food or water and energy, but there has been a reluctance to bring forward a broader systematic perspective that captures the multiple sectors and resource dependencies while understanding its cost to the environment if we neglect these linkages. This book is a compilation of thirteen papers published previously as a special issue of Water International, contains significant pieces of work on the W-E-F nexus focusing on relevant tools, solutions and governance at local and broader human scales.

It is beyond doubt that the interconnectedness between food, energy, water security and environmental sustainability exists and is getting amplified with increased globalization. It has been recognized that efforts to address only one part of a systemic problem by neglecting other inherently interlinked aspects may not lead to desirable and sustainable outcomes. In this perspective, policy- and decision- making requires a nexus approach that reduces trade-offs and builds synergies across sectors, and helps to reduce costs and increase benefits for humans and nature compared to independent approaches to the management of water, energy, food and the environment. In the past, work related to the Nexus has looked at the interactions between water and food or water and energy, but there has been a reluctance to bring forward a broader systematic perspective that captures the multiple sectors and resource dependencies while understanding its cost to the environment if we neglect these linkages. This book is a compilation of thirteen papers published previously as a special issue of Water International, contains significant pieces of work on the W-E-F nexus focusing on relevant tools, solutions and governance at local and broader human scales.

This book is the first comprehensive effort to bring together Water, Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) in a way that goes beyond the traditional focus on irrigated agriculture. Apart from looking at the role of water and sanitation for human well-being, it proposes alternative and more locally appropriate ways to address complex water management and governance challenges from the local to global levels against a backdrop of growing uncertainties.

The authors challenge mainstream supply-oriented and neo-Malthusian visions that argue for the need to increase the land area under irrigation in order to feed the world’s growing population. Instead, they argue for a reframing of the debate concerning production processes, waste, food consumption and dietary patterns whilst proposing alternative strategies to improve water and land productivity, putting the interests of marginalized and disenfranchized groups upfront.

The book highlights how accessing water for FSN can be challenging for small-holders, vulnerable and marginalized women and men, and how water allocation systems and reform processes can negatively affect local people’s informal rights. The book argues for the need to improve policy coherence across water, land and food and is original in making a case for strengthening the relationship between the human rights to water and food, especially for marginalized women and men. It will be of great interest to practitioners, students and researchers working on water and food issues.