To meet the food demand of the 6 billion people or even more on earth in the future, three green revolutions are needed at the same time, says Johan Rockstrom, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute at the recent Resilience 2008 conference.
Rockstrom explained that the first 'green revolution' refers to the invention of hybrid seeds in agriculture which benefits many Asian countries including China.
Now the second revolution refers to agriculture with consideration of sustainable development and environment while the third revolution refers to green water for food production. Green water refers to rainwater.
Rockstrom said that research shows traditional agriculture cost too much water which in the long run will not be sustainable. But new thinking in water for agriculture will be a good solution for food problem in the future.
For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, if people only think of blue water which refers to water in the river or the lake, there is extreme shortage in Africa, but if people think of green water or the rainwater, most African countries have abundant runoff.
Therefore the question is how to use the rainwater.
Rockstrom says innovations in harvesting rainwater will help solve this problem. And many exemples and good practices have shown that this will be a new solution to solve the global food problem.
Practices in certain areas in Africa also show that resilience of landscape can be protected if people are careful to use their land and don't wait till it is too late to rescue the landscape from becoming worse.
Rockstrom explains that resilience is the capacity of the ecological system to deal with change and continue to develop.
Thinking of these triply revolution will help produce triple amount of food compare with the current double amount due to the first green revolution.
He suggests that no matter it is large scale or small scale agriculture, as long as the water goes through plants first and then evaporate to the sky, it will greatly help mankind to preserve the landscape of our earth.
This point of view brings a little hope to the pessimism about climate change or global water shortage.
By Xuefei Chen People's Daily Online correspondent in Stockholm.
What is resilience ?
Resilience refers to the capacity of a social-ecological system both to withstand perturbations from for instance climate or economic shocks and to rebuild and renew itself afterwards.
Loss of resilience can cause loss of valuable ecosystem services, and may even lead to rapid transitions or shifts into qualitatively different situations and configurations, evident in, for instance people, ecosystems, knowledge systems, or whole cultures.
The resilience lens provides a new framework for analyzing social—ecological systems in a changing world facing many uncertainties and challenges. It represents an area of explorative research under rapid development with major policy implications for sustainable development.
Why resilience?
Sometimes change is gradual and things move forward in roughly continuous and predictable ways. At other times, change is sudden, disorganizing and turbulent reflected in climate impacts, earth system science challenges and vulnerable regions. Evidence points to a situation where periods of such abrupt change are likely to increase in frequency and magnitude. This challenges the adaptive capacity of societies.
The resilience approach focuses on the dynamic interplay between periods of gradual and sudden change and how to adapt to and shape change.
Research at the Stockholm Resilience Centre will address these challenges in order to generate a deeper understanding of interdependent social-ecological systems for improved governance and policy.
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