The rising awareness, though late, of the serious impacts of climate change on our planet has challenged our optimistic vision of continuing progress and the relevance of the current world economic model.

We have not only come to realize that the earth’s resources cannot, in the long run, meet the demand of a world population following the model of developed societies, but we became, at the same time, conscious of the immense risks associated with the negative impacts of climate change on the sustainability of the world’s natural resources.

The issues of the economic model and of natural resources degradation are converging in a way that a new ecological order becomes a corollary to a new economic order.

Progress in enhancing food security has been slow and seriously undermined by the drastic rise in world prices from 2007 to mid-2008 and the global financial crunch which unfolded in the second half of 2008.

The number of hungry people in the world rose by more than 115 million, bringing the total number of people suffering from chronic hunger to more than one billion people or 15% of the world population. Social unrest occurred in a number of countries and cities.

This is an early warning sign of what is to come, possibly on much larger scale, in the event of future food shortages.

Feeding the world’s growing population and finding the land and water to grow the food continues to be a basic and sizeable challenge. By the middle of this century, the world’s population is projected to reach 9.1 billion, 34 percent higher than today.

Nearly all of this increase will occur in developing countries. In order to respond to the expected demand of this larger, more urban and, on average, richer population, food production must increase by about 70% as estimated by the FAO.

It is an enormous task because the required increase in food production to meet future needs will have to be achieved with fewer land and water resources. Some regions face severe and increasing resource scarcity.

South Asia and the Near East/North Africa have exhausted much of their rainfed land potentials and depleted a significant share of their renewable waters. More than 1.2 billion people live in river basins where absolute water scarcity and increasing shortages are serious concerns.

Expanding land under cultivation is possible in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America but requires adequate farming practices, increased investments and sustainable management of natural resources.

Distrust in markets, pressure on natural resources, and the reexamination of the “merits” of selfsufficiency have led many countries to start rebuilding their national stocks and investing in agriculture in other countries to secure supplies.

Large-scale acquisitions of farmland in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and South East Asia have made headlines in a flurry of media reports across the world.

For people in recipient countries, this new context may create opportunities for economic development and livelihood improvement in rural areas.

But, in the absence of a code of conduct, it may also result in local people losing access to resources on which they depend for their food security.

In addition to this “hunger for land” and “thirst for water,” global agriculture will have to cope with the burden of climate change whose likely impacts have been documented in great detail in many reports.

Most of them conclude that the global food production potential is expected to contract severely and yields of major crops like wheat and maize may fall globally. The declines will be particularly pronounced in lower-latitude regions.

In Africa, Asia and Latin America, for instance, yields could decline by 20-40 percent. In addition, severe weather occurrences such as droughts and floods are likely to intensify and cause greater crop and livestock losses.

Recent IFPRI analyses suggest that calorie availability will not only be lower than in the no-climate change scenario, it will actually decline relative to 2000 levels throughout the developing world.

Climate change will also result in additional price increases for the most important crops—rice

wheat, maize and soybeans.

The implications are that food security for the chronically poor will deteriorate in four dimensions:

(1) availability of food will decrease due to scarcity arising from declining water resources, global population increase, worsening climatic conditions, changing food demands and shift from food to biofuel production;

(2) poor people’s access to food will decline due to worsening terms of trade between wages and food costs;

(3) stability of supply is threatened due to increasing prevalence of disasters, uncertainty regarding food prices, and national protectionism; and

(4) safe and healthy use of food will deteriorate as the poor switch to diets lacking essential micronutrients increasing child malnutrition. Increasing food insecurity might lead to more competition over water resources, migration, difficulties of supplying cities and ultimately state failures and international conflicts.

However, in contrast with this pessimistic vision, adaptation to climate change creates unprecedented opportunities for fundamental changes (economic, institutional, technological, social and political) that have been for a long time deferred.

In this context, Integrated Water Resources Management – IWRM- offers a glimmer of hope.

IWRM calls for integration of actions affecting drinking water and sanitation supply, agriculture and irrigation, hydropower and other energy production, and maintenance of environmental water flows to protect habitats and sustain groundwater supplies.

The approach recognizes the interconnectedness of water resources issues, from promoting wise uses of water that preserve long-term sustainability to arranging for fair and economical sharing of scarce resources among competing users.