Water saving through international trade of agricultural products

Many nations save domestic water resources by importing water-intensive products and exporting commodities that are less water intensive. National water saving through the import of a product can imply saving water at a global level if the flow is from sites with high to sites with low water productivity. The paper analyses the consequences of international virtual water flows on the global and national water budgets. The assessment shows that the total amount of water that would have been required in the importing countries if all imported agricultural products would have been produced domestically is 1605 Gm3/yr. These products are however being produced with only 1253 Gm3/yr in the exporting countries, saving global water resources by 352 Gm3/yr. This saving is 28 per cent of the international virtual water flows related to the trade of agricultural products and 6 per cent of the global water use in agriculture. National policy makers are however not interested in global water savings but in the status of national water resources. Egypt imports wheat and in doing so saves 3.6 Gm3/yr of its national water resources. Water use for producing export commodities can be beneficial, as for instance in Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Brazil, where the use of green water resources (mainly through rain-fed agriculture) for the production of stimulant crops for export has a positive economic impact on the national economy. However, export of 28 Gm3/yr of national water from Thailand related to rice export is at the cost of additional pressure on its blue water resources. Importing a product which has a relatively high ratio of green to blue virtual water content saves global blue water resources that generally have a higher opportunity cost than green water.\u

The water footprint of cotton consumption

The consumption of a cotton product is connected to a chain of impacts on the water resources in the countries where cotton is grown and processed. The aim of this report is to assess the ‘water footprint’ of worldwide cotton consumption, identifying both the location and the character of the impacts. The study distinguishes between three types of impact: evaporation of infiltrated rainwater for cotton growth (green water use), withdrawal of ground- or surface water for irrigation or processing (blue water use) and water pollution during growth or processing. The latter impact is quantified in terms of the dilution volume necessary to assimilate the pollution. For the period 1997-2001 the study shows that the worldwide consumption of cotton products requires 256 Gm3 of water per year, out of which about 42% is blue water, 39% green water and 19% dilution water. Impacts are typically cross-border. About 84% of the water footprint of cotton consumption in the EU25 region is located outside Europe, with major impacts particularly in India and Uzbekistan. Given the general lack of proper water pricing mechanisms or other ways of transmitting production-information, cotton consumers have little incentive to take responsibility for the impacts on remote water systems

An organisational model for university libraries in transition

Every university has a university library that has been there from the start. And at the start, the situation was relatively simple. There was a library, almost always located in one building, very often in the middle of the university buildings. It was the place where staff and students went to gather scientific information and to study. It was the pride of many universities. The library’s organisation contained a number of departments, one for every separate activity (selection, acquisition, cataloguing, etc.) and sometimes also for separate parts of the collection (manuscripts, reference collection, etc.). But, of course, not all the university’s books were contained in this library. Professors had their own books which were located in their own rooms. And gradually many professors built their own collection which was also available for their scientific staff. They gradually became libraries for an institution. In the second half of the 20th century, a lot of attention has been given to universities as organisations. National ministries strived towards guidelines that were directed at more efficiency. More or less professional managers became part of the university’s organisational structure. Faculties were reorganised, institutions became formalised departments and the institutions’ libraries were redefined as parts of the faculty’s infrastructure. And notwithstanding a lot of resistance, the library facilities within a faculty were merged into a small number and often one faculty library

The Figaro project. A new approach towards academic publishing

ABSTRACT: The current difficulties of scholarly publishing are set out and a response to them based upon publishing by the institutions of the authors involved is described. An account of the role of the FIGARO Project in facilitating such a response is then given

The SPARC initiative : a catalyst for change

SPARC was started in 1997 by a number of large research libraries in the US. Its main goal was to restore a competitive balance of the STM journals publishing market. A number of programmatic areas were initiated in order to realize this goal: SPARC Alternatives, SPARC Leading Edge, SPARC Scientific Communities, and SPARC Communication and Advocacy. Since two years SPARC puts a special emphasis on Open Access, including institutional repositories. The paper gives an overview of the activities of SPARC and its partners in these areas. The results are evaluated and compared with the measures defined in 1997. Finally, the paper describes the possibilities for libraries to contribute to the realization of SPARC’s goals