Women in Kenya drag jerry cans of water 4 kilometers through a parched landscape. Photo by Erin Gray/Mercy Corps.

How bad is the drought and famine in East Africa? Climate scientist Simon Mason elaborates in this video interview. Comparing East Africa’s situation to other drought situations, Mason highlights the dramatic impacts in a region receiving 5 to 25% of its usual expected rainfall.

With the world facing more and more severe climate-related disruptions, Mason explains some ways in which weather forecasting is being used to help humanitarian aid organizations prepare responses in the short and long term. Check out his interview here.

Reliance on quality produce from Africa prompted Albert Heijn to undertake aid projects. Photo: Erik Mandell for MercyCorps

A Dutch company looks to combine international aid with corporate profit, according to allAfrica.com.

The supermarket chain Albert Heijn is funding and conducting development projects in Africa, including constructing water systems in Ghana, farmer training programs in South Africa, and expanded schooling in Kenya. But the company doesn’t claim that its efforts are based in charity. "It's very much business-driven. It bears almost no resemblance to charity or good causes," says Henri Zondag, chair of the Albert Heijn foundation.

Albert Heijn supermarkets rely heavily on quality produce from Africa, and the idea is that healthier, happier and better-educated suppliers make trade relationships more productive. The Dutch government is a player in this arrangement too, encouraging business-sector participation in cooperative development relationships and economic benefits for the Netherlands. The government hopes that “making a profit can be a great incentive for [development] projects.” The company envisions projects that forge partnerships that lead to greater profit. If both are correct, in the long term all parties involved could win.

Erik Mandell is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont. He is currently pursuing a master's degree in public administration and global leadership at Portland State. Read his other contributions to Global Envision.

PepsiCo and Cambridge University recently unveiled the i-crop, a web-based system that could reduce agricultural water waste by 50 percent. Photo:zekasaur (flickr)

This article was republished in The Christian Science Monitor.

"More Bounce to the Ounce.” In the 1950’s, it was a cola slogan; thanks to a new partnership with Cambridge University, it could become the catch phrase of PepsiCo’s i-crop, a web based program that helps farmers reduce water waste.

Here’s how it works: data systems collect information on local weather conditions, farming activity, and soil moisture from underground probes and compiles them online. With a few keystrokes, farmers can eliminate the guessing games about water consumption, resulting in more precise and environmentally-friendly farming. In October, PepsiCo publicly announced its goal of reducing carbon emissions and water usage from their largest UK farms by 50 percent in five years. So far i-crop is testing well: preliminary reports from 22 farms in the UK show farmers have achieved 90 percent efficiency in water usage.

"Farming is in the DNA of our business - we rely on fresh produce everyday," said Richard Evans, President of PepsiCo UK and Ireland, according to PR Newswire. "Finding ways to produce more food with less environmental impact is essential to our future." He added, "i-crop has the potential to revolutionize the way we farm, enabling our farmers to save costs and [reduce] water and carbon consumption, while at the same time improving their yields.”

PepsiCo’s potential to revolutionize water efficiencies in farming is sizable. Netting approximately $43.3 billion annually and employing more than a quarter million people, PepsiCo is the second largest food and beverage business in the world.

Ever enjoyed Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew, Lay's, Gatorade, Tropicana, 7Up, Doritos, Lipton Teas, Quaker Oats, Cheetos, Ruffles, Aquafina, Tostitos, Sierra Mist, or Fritos? If the i-crop can deliver as hoped, those products will soon be made with less water waste than most competitive grocery items (and who doesn’t want something positive to hold onto after downing a bag of Cheetos?).

Although the i-crop is only accessible to UK farmers, PepsiCo hopes to introduce its technology to farms in India, China, Mexico, and Australia by 2012. However, speculation about i-crop’s availability has raised some eyebrows and provoked the question: Will the i-crop technology, owned privately by PepsiCo, be withheld from those who most need it?

Brain Pickings editor Maria Popova argues that owning such coveted technological rights will put PepsiCo in the middle of an often tense relationship between profiteering and humanitarianism. “The technology is currently only available to PepsiCo-affiliated growers, which raises interesting questions about the relationship between corporate interests and social good in innovation, as well as bespeaking the disconnect between the value of open-source software and the fact that the best-funded research initiatives, most competent scientists and highest-grade technology tend to be subsidized by private corporations.”

If, how, and with whom PepsiCo shares i-crop technology has yet to be determined. In any case, PepsiCo has taken corporate social responsibility by the horns, hopefully luring other influential corporations to recognize that being green is achievable. "Every Generation Refreshes the World," Pespi ads claim. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that PepsiCo can do so for the next generation’s water supply.

Even in the driest of deserts, there’s a hidden water source: the air.

That's the insight of this year's Dyson Award winner. The annual prizes call on “design and engineering students from 18 countries to create innovative, practical, elegant solutions to some of humanity's greatest challenges,” according to The Huffington Post. This year the award went to Edward Linacre for his groundbreaking solution to agricultural catastrophes caused by drought. He won £10,000 for his invention—the Airdrop—and so did his school, Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology. The Airdrop pulls air into a network of tubes underground, where it is cooled to extract moisture and then funneled down to plants’ roots. See his “elevator pitch” for the project below:

Harvesting water from the air isn’t a new idea; National Geographic reported on the ancient technique of fog harvesting back in 2009. Linacre told the Daily Mail that his design is a unique solution for agricultural issues because “other systems of harvesting water from the atmosphere usually require massive amounts of energy, as they run refrigeration units. Airdrop simply uses the temperature difference between the air and the cool earth beneath the surface.” The Airdrop, he says, is a good solution for rural farmers because it’s low-tech: they can install and maintain it themselves.

Whether or not this design can practically translate to the developing world is still up in the air and probably depends largely upon its cost. Still, the simple idea of tapping into the water that’s present in the air in even the driest of environments could be very promising for increasingly parched areas of the globe.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

The Ganges River Delta, in Pakistan, could be feeding a lot more people. Photo: Lunar Planetary Institute (Flickr)

This article was republished by The Christian Science Monitor.

The next century is going to leave the planet parched for drinking water. But a new study asserts that the problem isn't water scarcity -- it's water efficiency.

The global population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says we need to increase food and water production by 70% if we are to feed that population. Can we do that with the resources we have?

Yes, says the study, published by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Researchers looked at 10 major river basins to assess how the world uses its water, and concluded that with refined practices, we can sustainably exceed the needs of current and future generations.

It is not how much water we have, but how we use that water, that will drive resource politics. According to CGIAR, most of the world considers different uses of water in isolation from one another. A more integrated approach to the water needs of food, industry, and energy would lead to more efficient allocation.

Dr. Simon Cook, of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture described the current practice as one of “complete fragmentation of how river basins are managed amongst different actors and even countries where the water needs of different sectors – agriculture, industry, environment and mining – are considered separately rather than as interrelated and interdependent.”

Today, for example, water rights are allocated to hydroelectricity in the Mekong, leaving farmers and fishermen up and down the river bereft of water. There's no shortage of Mekong water. It's just being unevenly distributed. CGIAR recommend water institutions take a more integrated approach, one the total needs of water within a region, rather than having compartmentalized institutions working independent from one another.

In sub-Saharan Africa, where the land is regularly parched and massive droughts like the current one in East Africa may become more commonplace, improving methods to save and store rain for agriculture use would also boost food production.

So the problem may not be an issue of resource scarcity or carrying capacity. But with this news comes responsibility: if the problems lie with us, then so must the solution.

Could the meat you eat one day be born in this? Photo:chesbayprogram (flickr)

Historically, meat has been for the world’s rich. Lab-grown meat could change that forever—while helping solve the environmental and resource dilemmas of the future.

Amid widespread speculation that the current market for food production won’t be able to provide for the world’s population by 2050, a recent innovation cooked up in a Dutch lab has been getting attention for its in vitro meat – also known as cultured or fake meat. A concept which is "becoming a holy grail for anyone concerned about the environmental and ethical impacts of rearing millions of animals around the world each year for human consumption," says The Guardian.

In another article from The Guardian, a group of Oxford researchers said that lab-grown meat could help feed the growing world population while reducing the impact on the environment.

The product may seem distasteful, but the statistics are compelling. This more sustainable method of producing protein promises to increase the chances of food security for the world’s poor while simultaneously protecting the environment. The projected resource savings from artificial meat are remarkable–an Oxford study estimated it could be engineered to use only 1 percent of the land and 4 percent of the water required for conventional meat.

For decades, environmentalists have been lamenting meat production, acccording to The Guardian:

Links between meat consumption and climate change have been widely known for many years, partly due to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest to make room for the livestock. Clearing these forests is estimated to produce a staggering 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transport sector.

Many scientists are adamant that changes will have to be made. But will it be possible to strike a balance between preserving the environment and providing for the world’s rapidly increasing population? As it is, the statistics on global hunger are alarming. According to the UN’s World Food Programme, there are 925 million chronically hungry people, 98 percent of whom live in the developing world. More than one in seven people do not have enough protein and energy in their diet.

The UN estimates that to feed a global population of 9 billion by 2050, food production will have to increase by 70 percent. Table: Farming First

Increased meat-eating usually correlates with a country’s rising affluence, but this could soon change. Many scientists insist that with further research, man-made meat will someday be on the menu of solutions to the global resource dilemmas of the future.

The drought this year has reduced China's normal rainfall by 40 to 60 percent. Photo: otrocalpe (flickr)

Crisis is lurking on the world's most valuable commodity: water. The answer, a former U.S. official says, is raising its price.

Peter Orszag, President Barack Obama's former budget czar, tells the story in a Bloomberg View column by looking closely at China. That nation's water goes mainly to its coal and hydroelectric power plants. As China’s Ministry of Water Resources says, "In 2010, coal-fired electricity in China used more than 30 trillion gallons of water, or about 20 percent of the country’s total consumption." The problem with this is that water sources are limited. While China is using its available water for electricity, climates are changing and reducing the amount of available fresh water. The drought this year has reduced China's normal rainfall by 40 to 60 percent, and the water that's left is going to crops and people, not coal plants. This, in turn, has rattled global diesel markets as China has grasped for alternatives to coal energy by relying more on diesel powered generators. Disturbances in the water market ripple throughout the world economy.

To fix this, Orszag suggests a three-step process for China and the rest of the world to follow when thinking about the way we use our water.

First, China needs to do a better job blocking pollution and expanding awareness of the dangers of climate change. According to the World Bank, "about 90 percent of the aquifers underneath major cities in China are polluted. More than 300 million Chinese lack access to safe drinking water." The first step to using water more efficiently is making sure the water we have is water we can use.

Second, China needs to allocate its water more productively. Currently, the water in China is not evenly divided between regions. Orszag explains that 80 percent of the country's water supply is south of the Yangtze River, though only about half the population lives there. The rest live in the North China plain, which encompasses Shanghai, Beijing, and less than 15 percent of the nation’s water. With such an imbalance, the per-capita amount in the North evens out to only about one-quarter the level considered to be the minimum amount to live on. Plans are underway to balance this with a desalination plant in the Tianhin-Binhai development zone and a re-routing plan to channel more water from the South to the North, according to The Guardian.

Third, China and other nations need to raise their water prices. At a first glance, this seems impractical. Reactions from comments on Orszag’s article were primarily negative. They argued that water is not a commodity, but a natural right for each person, and therefore shouldn’t be marked with a price. Orszag, anticipating this, suggests giving everyone a set amount of free, fresh water for basic necessities. Any water desired beyond that point would come with a tariff. This way, people will use water carefully, avoiding waste.

Orszag finds that this three-step strategy can be applied to almost any nation. The strategy could be used in the U.S. where water is heavily subsidized and in Europe where water pricing systems vary between countries that lack water and those that have an abundance.

"Just as we need to price carbon in order to avoid a climate crisis, we need to price water to avoid a water crisis," Orszag writes.

Everybody poops. This fact has proved to be a large problem in terms of maintaining the world's sanitation. Recently, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has turned it into something positive.

The foundation explains that 40 percent of the world's population has no contact with flush toilets. They are left to defecate in the open, bringing severe problems. For example, nearly 1.5 billion children die each year from diarrheal diseases.

On July 19, in Kigali, Rwanda, the foundation launched its new initiative to bring safe sanitation services to the world. Their plan begins with the toilet and $42 million to jump start the project. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation’s Global Development Program, explains that the toilet has been the best invention for the world's sanitation. The only problem is that it's not accessible enough for everyone. "We need to reinvent the toilet," she says.

Partnering with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the initiative will support the United Nations’ 2015 Millennium Development Goals with the Sanitation For All project, aiming to reduce the amount of people living without basic sanitation by 50 percent. Together, they will find ways to build hygienic, water conserving, and human waste recycling toilets that can be built and sustained at a low cost. One such initiative is the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge, where Universities around the world race to develop a toilet without pipes, sewer connection or electricity for less than 5 cents a day.

With a reinvented toilet, the possibilities are endless. It will reduce exposure to disease and keep kids in school — ultimately boosting local economies with healthier workers and much lower health care costs. The human waste can become fertilizer and fuel for local communities, and even fresh drinking water. The Reinventing the Toilet Challenge is showing us that human waste really isn’t waste at all.

What do you get when you combine 120,000 data points measuring 200 years of income and life expectancy data for 200 countries with the creative genius of global health expert Hans Rosling? This. Watch.

In the early 1990s Saddam Hussein drained what biblical scholars believe to be the Garden of Eden. With the water went the people, known as the Ma’dan, and their way of life. Now, Iraqi-American hydraulic engineer Dr. Azzam Alwash and his organization Nature Iraq, are working with the Ma’dan to restore the marshes of southern Iraq, in a project Alwash calls “Eden Again." He hopes the exiled people will come back as water and wildlife return to what had been turned into a desert, according to a segment on the PBS show, Nature.

For thousands of years the Ma’dan called the marshes home. They lived on floating islands made of reeds that grew in the marshes. They caught fish, hunted birds, and kept water buffalo, says an article from Spiegel Online. Without water this life wasn’t possible and the Ma’dan people either migrated to the city or suffered in poverty.

Alwash returned to the marshes in 2003 after Hussein fled from power. He found that those that had remained in the area had already begun to dig through the man-made embankments that diverted the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers away from the marshes, he explained in a recent NPR interview. Flash forward seven years and the Ma’dan have destroyed up to 98 percent of the embankments, Alwash tells the Guardian. Their motivations more economic, than anything else.

Not because they are tree-huggers or bird-lovers, but because it's a source of economic income to them, because they can harvest reeds and sell them. They can fish and feed a family or sell them to earn extra income.

Hundreds of thousands of Ma’dan people who have been living in urban exile are now used to many aspects of modern life, Alwash explains in another article in the Guardian. They’ve become familiar with electricity, television, air-conditioning and wifi. But Alwash sees no reason why comforts such as these can’t be incorporated into the traditional Ma’dan way of life. Once services are in place Alwash anticipates a flood of “reverse migration.”

Right now, the biggest stressors to the marshes are ongoing drought and hydro-dams in Iraq's northern neighbor, Turkey. In the NPR interview Alwash explains that the drought has reduced the marshes to about 35 percent of their former size. But Alwash is confident that 75 percent of the marshes can be restored despite the drought and dams in Turkey.

When Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in the early 1990s he attempted to turn a paradise into a desert and wipe one of the oldest civilizations on earth off the face of the earth itself. He nearly succeeded. But with the help of Dr. Azzam Alwash and Nature Iraq, the Ma’dan have proved the resilient force that nature and humanity are, as a desert becomes Eden again.

Iraqi photographer Sate Al Abbasi's beautiful shots of Ma'dan people at home in the marshes can be viewed in the slideshow below.

“The Sleeping Giant is awake,” declares ABC reporter Diane Sawyer, who's reporting from Shanghai this week.

Sawyer is in China examining the rapid transformation of the largest emerging economy in the world – an economy growing at the rate of 10 percent a year. Sawyer is on a hunt for some answers about China's rapid growth -- what it means for the American economy and how the government managed to pull off such a feat in a little more than two decades.

Everyday for every baby born in the United States, almost four babies will be born in China… The Chinese say that they can build a supper highway in the time it takes to get a permit and paper work done in the U.S. Last week 200 workers in unison built a 15-story hotel in six days... By the end of next year the train from Beijing to Shanghai will take four hours. That’s about the distance from New York to Atlanta, which takes Americans 18 hours.

But, growth like this comes at a cost. According to Sawyer, “[a] quarter of the
water in the country is unsafe. [China is] the worlds worst polluters and that pollution
contributes to 70 percent of cancer deaths.” China's growth also hasn't managed to pull all its people out of poverty... Yet. “700 million people still live in poverty in China surviving on less than $2 a day,” reports Sawyer.

Check out Diane Sawyers report in this video belowand get an inside look at the growing polarities as Diane Sawyer does China by the Numbers.

This has been reposted from the Mercy Corps blog.

On my first day in Zimbabwe, I went to visit some farm families in the town of Murejwa. People are poor there, and Mercy Corps is working with them to find ways to boost their incomes.

In this video, I'm with Fred and Beauty Jokonya, who live and farm on a half-acre on the outskirts of town. The star of this show, however, is a piece of basic technology: the treadle pump. As you'll see, this pump has made the farm and its owners a lot more productive.

I mention in the video that Fred and Beauty are looking after many of their grandchildren. What I don't mention in the video but want to note here is that the kids are AIDS orphans. In recent years, about 20 percent of Zimbabwe's adults have been struggling with HIV/AIDS and as a result there is a whole generation of kids being raised by their grandparents.

Heather Fleming has been named one of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders for 2010. Young Global Leaders are recognized by the World Economic Forum as "exceptional young leaders who share a commitment to shaping the global future."

Born on an Indian reservation in New Mexico, Fleming knows first hand the difficulties people face growing up without resources many take for granted, such as running water or electricity. Her experiences eventually led to the pursuit of a degree as a civil engineer and the start up of Catapult Design, a company she co-founded with Tyler Valiquette. Catapult Design "is a non-profit firm providing engineering and implementation support to the thousands of organizations in need of technologies or products capable of igniting social change."

Fleming has worked with other like-minded designers and engineers as a co-founder of Engineers Without Borders, D2M and as a co-leader for Appropriate Technology Design Team. These design and engineering companies provide low-impact solutions that benefit the world with inventions such as the "turbulent air" turbine, improvements to the Hippo Roller--a water barrel with handles that can be rolled and a fuel efficient cooking stove for Darfur refugees that uses less wood.

See Fleming talk about her passion for the work she does in this video.

The MPI would examine factors besides how much money this Nepalese woman makes picking tea. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps.

What exactly does it mean to be poor? Is it strictly a matter of income, or do other factors count as well, like education and health?

Oxford's new look at poverty may be able to help us better understand which hardships challenge the world's poor. The Multidimensional Poverty Index, or MPI, takes a more holistic approach to measuring poverty than previous poverty indexes, which have focused mainly on income, reports Planet Money. It was designed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) in partnership with the United Nations.

The MPI examines three major aspects of poverty: education, health and living standard. More specifically, it considers 10 indicators that affect well-being on a household level, like quality of nutrition, type of cooking fuel, and if a family has a latrine. Ideally, the result is a detailed portrait of the nature and intensity of poverty.

So far the MPI has been applied to populations in 104 developing countries, which are home to nearly 80 percent of the world's poor. Check out OPHI's cool interactive world map to explore the poverty indicators for these countries.

Economists like the World Bank's Martin Ravillion question the MPI's methodology, claiming that it's a mistake to combine so many disparate factors into a single index as though they are equal in value. Ravillion describes the MPI's weakness like comparing "apples and oranges" here on Oxfam's From Poverty to Power blog.

But Sabina Alkire, co-creator of the MPI, insists on the importance of considering multiple aspects so we can understand not just who is poor but "how they are poor." Multidimensional models like the MPI could potentially teach us about correlations between various factors -- for example, does the fact that a child is malnourished relate to whether he or she is educated? OPHI explains how economists, governments and NGOs can apply the new index to their endeavors:

The MPI can be used as an analytical tool to identify the most vulnerable people, show aspects in which they are deprived and help to reveal the interconnections among deprivations. This enables policy makers to target resources and design policies more effectively.

Belu's eco-friendly, socially responsible bio-bottles. Photo: Courtesy of Belu

There are few things more satisfying than a cold drink of water. But for lots of people in the world, clean drinking water is hard to come by. A UK-based company called Belu is helping change this. Pronounced "blue," the nonprofit sells bottled water in their eco-friendly "bio-bottle," made from compostable corn plastic and capped with a PVC-free top.

For every bottle of water they sell, the folks at Belu provide one person in a developing country with clean water for a month:

In collaboration with Oxfam, WaterAid, and Fresh2O, Belu has thus far funded the installation of wells, hand pumps and rainwater harvesting technology in four countries: India, Mali, Bangladesh and Madagascar. These projects are rated to provide safe drinking water to over 43,264 people for at least fifteen years.

For a bottled water company, that's pretty refreshing.