International water and food security development: Performance evaluation and assessment of research needs at multiple scales

Water and food security remain the top development challenges of the decade, and perhaps the century. Since the Millennium Development Goals were established in 2000, billions of people have obtained access to more food, better nutrition, improved water, and basic sanitation facilities worldwide. This progress has been accomplished through the dedication of international organizations, non-governmental organizations, country-level governments, private corporations, and individuals at international, regional, and local scales. Truly tremendous strides have been made in water and food provisioning for humans worldwide. These past two decades have also seen the largest population growth on record, the highest rates of childhood mortality, and climate effects including drought and shifting rainfall that have caused widespread food shortages and death. In 2014, more than one thousand children under the age of 5 died per day of a preventable water related disease, millions of people went without access to adequate nutrition, and billions were without basic sanitation facilities. The current efforts to provide basic human needs including water and food provisioning are not sufficient to end the widespread water related deaths and chronic hunger issues. The research presented herein focuses on understanding previously implemented water and sanitation programs, as well as current research for development efforts relating to water and food security. Overall, this work begins with an analysis of limitations to previously implemented projects, then moves to an analysis of a subset of organizations that are implementing water and food development interventions, and finally concludes with a regional example of how future climate change may alter the management and implementation of water and food programs. Specifically, this work addresses: (1) the quality of improved drinking water sources in western Kenya and southern Vietnam; (2) the status of sanitation facilities in western Kenya and southern Vietnam; (3) stakeholder perceptions and research needs of water and food development programs in the Mekong Basin; (4) how project selection tools can leverage social networks; and (5) how climate change knowledge and perceptions could influence management decisions on a regional scale. These findings suggest that careful attention should be paid to how organizations define and monitor development interventions. Additionally, this work articulates the value of stakeholder acceptability and the opportunity of leveraging social networks to select and prioritize projects that are more likely to succeed in the long term. The evidence derived from the regional study on climate change perceptions, suggests that further research is needed in water and agriculture management strategies for long term resilience. These research needs are identified and described

Global Service-Learning: A Systematic Review of Principles and Practices

Related dataset is at https://doi.org/10.7302/wazb-wk46 and also listed in the dc.relation field of the full item record.Global service-learning brings students, instructors, and communities together to support learning and community development across borders. In global service-learning, practitioners act at the intersection of two fields: service-learning and international development. Critical scholarship in all service-learning and international development has highlighted the tensions inherent in defining and tracking “success” in community development. In response, service-learning and international development have turned considerable attention to documenting project characteristics, also known as best practices or success factors, that support equitable, sustainable community development. This article presents a systematic synthesis of these fields’ best practices in the context of global service-learning. The authors propose 18 guiding principles for project design to support practitioners in creating and maintaining justice-oriented, stakeholder-driven projects. The authors compare these principles to emerging best practices in global service-learning and assess the contribution of service-learning and international development research to informing the future of the field.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171267/1/Hawes et al_2021_Global Service-Learning.pdfSEL

Climate Change and Water Resources

XVIII, 221 p. 35 illus. in color.online resource

Potable WaterEmerging Global Problems and Solutions /

XVII, 233 p. 45 illus., 33 illus. in color.onlin

Large cities get more for less: Water footprint efficiency across the US.

Many urban indicators and functional citywide properties have been shown to scale with population due to agglomeration effects. We hypothesize that scaling relations may also exist for water-related urban indicators such as the water footprint. The water footprint is an indicator of water use that measures humans' appropriation of freshwater resources. We analyze the scaling of the water footprint for 65 mid- to large-sized US cities using both empirical estimates and a social interaction network model of city functioning. The network model is used to explain the presence of any scaling exponent in the empirical estimates of the urban water footprint by linking to previous theories of urban scaling. We find that the urban water footprint tends to approximately show sublinear scaling behavior with both population and gross domestic product. Thus, large cities tend to be more water footprint efficient and productive than mid-sized cities, where efficiency and productivity are quantified, in a broad sense, as deviations from a linear scaling exponent. We find the sublinear scaling may be linked to changes in urban economic structure with city size, which lead to large cities shifting water intensive economic activities to less populated regions. In addition, we find that green water contributes to the scaling both positively by transferring the dependence of food consumption on population into the water footprint and negatively by increasing heterogeneity. Overall, the proposed scaling relations allow for the comparison of water footprint efficiency and productivity of cities. Comparing these properties and identifying deviations from the expected behavior has implications for water resources and urban sustainability

Who is being left behind? An analysis of improved drinking water and basic sanitation access in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

The global community has made tremendous strides in providing access to water and sanitation in recent decades. Driven by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which sought to halve the proportion of the global population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, billions of people now have access to these basic human rights. As the global community works to implement the next generation of development goals, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is critical to determine how unserved populations can be reached. To investigate indicators of water and sanitation access, surveys were conducted among 300 households in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. Households with and without access to improved water or basic sanitation were identified and data from these surveys were subjected to multiple regression analyses to identify household characteristics that correlate with access. It was found that for households without access to either water or sanitation, three variables were statistically significant predictors of access: distance to local government, household floor material, and the gender of the household water manager. Predictors of access to water and sanitation were evaluated separately. This integrated water and sanitation case study draws several implications for this next phase of SDG development programming

Tradeoffs and Synergies Across Global Climate Change Adaptations in the Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus

Food-energy-water (FEW) systems are increasingly vulnerable to natural hazards and climate change risks, yet humans depend on these systems for their daily needs, wellbeing, and survival. We investigated how adaptations related to FEW vulnerabilities are occurring and what the global community can learn about the interactions across these adaptations. We conducted a global analysis of a data set derived from scientific literature to present the first large scale assessment (n = 1,204) of evidence-based FEW-related climate adaptations. We found that the most frequently reported adaptations to FEW vulnerabilities by continent occurred in Africa (n = 495) and Asia (n = 492). Adaptations targeting food security were more robustly documented than those relevant to water and energy security, suggesting a greater global demand to address food security. Determining statistically significant associations, we found a network of connections between variables characterizing FEW-related adaptations and showed interconnectedness between a variety of natural hazards, exposures, sectors, actors, cross-cutting topics and geographic locations. Connectivity was found between the vulnerabilities food security, water, community sustainability, and response to sea level rise across cities, settlements, and key infrastructure sectors. Additionally, generalized linear regression models revealed potential synergies and tradeoffs among FEW adaptations, such as a necessity to synergistically adapt systems to protect food and water security and tradeoffs when simultaneously addressing exposures of consumption and production vs. poverty. Results from qualitative thematic coding showcased that adaptations documented as targeting multiple exposures are still limited in considering interconnectivity of systems and applying a nexus approach in their responses. These results suggest that adopting a nexus approach to future FEW-related adaptations can have profound benefits in the management of scarce resources and with financial constraint