Respecting safe operating spaces: opportunities to meet future food demand with sustainable use of water and land resources

2026-07-22

Although the human population has quadrupled over the past century, per capita food availability is globally higher than ever - at the expense of environment: scarcity of water and land as well as exceedance of several planetary boundaries. Projected population growth and climate change will further increase the pressure on feeding the planet with sustainably managed natural resources. SOS.aquaterra takes up this challenge by identifying feasible measures to meet future food demand while staying below water and land scarcity thresholds. The project develops novel integrated modelling and data analysis methods to fully exploit the rapidly increasing global open spatio-temporal datasets together with outputs from global agrological and hydrological models. In the proposal, instead of assessing water and land scarcity separately, which is the current practice, the assessments are integrated. The second novelty in SOS.aquaterra is developing an integrated model that combines for the first time the potential of conventional and innovative measures -e.g. yield gap closure, alternative protein sources- towards increased food availability. The feasibility of these measures, within the safe operating space resulting from scarcity assessment, is explored by analogical problem solving and clustering methods. The innovative integration of measures using the latest datasets and modelling tools holds high risks, yet it significantly advances the scientific and technological state of the art to meet food demand with sustainably managed natural resources.

Finland

2025-10-01