Access to sufficient and clean freshwater is essential for all life. Water is also essential for the functioning of food systems: as a key input into food production, but also in processing and preparation, and as a food itself. Water scarcity and pollution are growing, affecting poorer populations most, and particularly food producers. Malnutrition levels are also on the rise, and this is closely linked to water scarcity. The achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2 and 6 are co-dependent. Solutions for jointly improving food systems and water security outcomes include: (1) strengthening efforts to retain water-based ecosystems and their functions; (2) improving agricultural water management for better diets for all; (3) reducing water and food losses beyond the farmgate; (4) coordinating water with nutrition and health interventions; (5) increasing the environmental sustainability of food systems; (6) explicitly addressing social inequities in water-nutrition linkages; and (7) improving data quality and monitoring for water-food system linkages, drawing on innovations in information and communications technology (ICT). Climate change and other environmental and societal changes make the implementation and scaling of solutions more urgent than ever. | Non-PR | 1 Fostering Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply; IFPRI4; DCA | Natural Resources and Resilience (NRR); Transformation Strategies

The United Nations Food Systems Summit aimed to chart a path toward transforming food systems toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Despite the essentiality of water for food systems, however, the Summit has not sufficiently considered the role of water for food systems transformation. This focus is even more important due to rapidly worsening climate change and its pervasive impacts on food systems that are mediated through water. To avoid that water “breaks” food systems, key food systems actors should 1) Strengthen efforts to retain water-dependent ecosystems, their functions and services; 2) Improve agricultural water management; 3) Reduce water and food losses beyond the farmgate; 4) Coordinate water with nutrition and health interventions; 5) Increase the environmental sustainability of food systems; 6) Explicitly address social inequities; and 7) Improve data quality and monitoring for water-food system linkages.

Earthquakes often cause destructive and unpredictable changes that can affect local hydrology (e.g. groundwater elevation or reduction) and thus disrupt land uses and human activities. Prolific agricultural regions overlie seismically active areas, emphasizing the importance to improve our understanding and monitoring of hydrologic and agricultural systems following a seismic event. A thorough data collection is necessary for adequate post-earthquake crop management response; however, the large spatial extent of earthquake's impact makes challenging the collection of robust data sets for identifying locations and magnitude of these impacts. Observing hydrologic responses to earthquakes is not a novel concept, yet there is a lack of methods and tools for assessing earthquake's impacts upon the regional hydrology and agricultural systems. The objective of this paper is to describe how remote sensing imagery, methods and tools allow detecting crop responses and damage incurred after earthquakes because a change in the regional hydrology. Many remote sensing datasets are long archived with extensive coverage and with well-documented methods to assess plant-water relations. We thus connect remote sensing of plant water relations to its utility in agriculture using a post-earthquake agrohydrologic remote sensing (PEARS) framework; specifically in agro-hydrologic relationships associated with recent earthquake events that will lead to improved water management.

The emerging foodborne and waterborne pathogen, Arcobacter, has been linked to various gastrointestinal diseases. Currently, 19 species are established or proposed; consequently, there has been an increase in the number of publications regarding Arcobacter since it was first introduced in 1991. To better understand the potential public health risks posed by Arcobacter, this review summarizes the current knowledge concerning the global distribution and the prevalence of Arcobacter in food and water. Arcobacter spp. were identified in food animals, food‐processing environments and a variety of foods, including vegetables, poultry, beef, dairy products, seafood, pork, lamb and rabbit. A wide range of waterbodies has been reported to be contaminated with Arcobacter spp., such as wastewater, seawater, lake and river water, drinking water, groundwater and recreational water. In addition, Arcobacter has also been isolated from pets, domestic birds, wildlife, zoo and farm animals. It is expected that advancements in molecular techniques will facilitate better detection worldwide and aid in understanding the pathogenicity of Arcobacter. However, more extensive and rigorous surveillance systems are needed to better understand the occurrence of Arcobacter in food and water in various regions of the world, as well as uncover other potential public health risks, that is antibiotic resistance and disinfection efficiency, to reduce the possibility of foodborne and waterborne infections.

Many regions in Africa and the Middle East are vulnerable to drought and to water and food insecurity, motivating agency efforts such as the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) to provide early warning of drought events in the region. Each year these warnings guide life-saving assistance that reaches millions of people. A new NASA multimodel, remote sensing–based hydrological forecasting and analysis system, NHyFAS, has been developed to support such efforts by improving the FEWS NET’s current early warning capabilities. NHyFAS derives its skill from two sources: (i) accurate initial conditions, as produced by an offline land modeling system through the application and/or assimilation of various satellite data (precipitation, soil moisture, and terrestrial water storage), and (ii) meteorological forcing data during the forecast period as produced by a state-of-the-art ocean–land–atmosphere forecast system. The land modeling framework used is the Land Information System (LIS), which employs a suite of land surface models, allowing multimodel ensembles and multiple data assimilation strategies to better estimate land surface conditions. An evaluation of NHyFAS shows that its 1–5-month hindcasts successfully capture known historic drought events, and it has improved skill over benchmark-type hindcasts. The system also benefits from strong collaboration with end-user partners in Africa and the Middle East, who provide insights on strategies to formulate and communicate early warning indicators to water and food security communities. The additional lead time provided by this system will increase the speed, accuracy, and efficacy of humanitarian disaster relief, helping to save lives and livelihoods.

Jawahar Puja, 'Water quality and food safety: a review and discussion of risks', Water Policy 11, IFPRI, 2009 | IFPRI3; ISI

Culture-independent techniques were used for the detection of pathogenic bacteria in drinking water at potentially critical control points along the production lines at a German dairy company and a Spanish dry cured ham company. Denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) was used to describe bacterial population shifts indicating biological instability in the drinking water samples. Autochthonous bacteria were identified by sequencing the excised DGGE DNA bands. More specifically, real-time PCR was applied to detect a number of pathogenic bacteria, i.e. Listeria monocytogenes, Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis, Campylobacter jejuni, Enterococcus spp., Salmonella spp, Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Due to the detection limits of the real-time PCR method, a specific protocol was established in order to meet the technical detection requirements and to avoid unwanted polymerase inhibitions. Autochthonous bacterial populations were found to be highly stable at most of the sampling points. Only one sampling point exhibited population shifts at the German dairy company. Enterococci and P. aeruginosa were detected in some water samples from these companies by molecular biology detection methods, but not by conventional culturing methods. Some opportunistic bacteria as Enterobacter sp., Acinetobacter, Sphingomonas sp. and non-pathogenic Bacillus, were also detected after DNA sequencing of DGGE bands.