Article Published by Global Water Forum Fracking on the Haynesville Shale, Louisiana. Photo by flickr user danielfoster437. The recent boom in the development of natural gas from shale is a game changer for U.S. domestic energy. Large domestic reserves of shale gas reduce dependency on foreign producers, as is currently the case for crude oil. … Continue reading »
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Water-hungry Indian villagers find new reservoirs of solidarity By:Mark Tran
Article published by: The Guardian Villagers on the bank of a body of water that feeds the surrounding fields, near Dungarpur, Rajasthan, February 2013. Photograph: Mark Tran for the Guardian The villages around Dungarpur town in India‘s north-western state of Rajasthan have a beguiling beauty. The hills are beginning to turn brown but the landscape … Continue reading »
Our Research Featured in INESAD’s Global South Development Magazine
Dear Readers, I and my research team’s project on ancient Maya water management systems in Central America was ranked at # 7 by INESAD in a news story covering 12 initiatives making a difference in food and agriculture. We want to thank INESAD staff very much for their consideration. I should also mention the names … Continue reading »
Water and Food Secuity Threatened in Himalayan River Basins By: Janak Pathak
A serious lack of reliable and consistent data severely hampers scientific knowledge about the state of Himalayan glaciers. As a result, the contribution of glacial melt to the Himalayan river basins remains uncertain. This is of grave importance because declining water availability could threaten the food security of more than 70 million people. There is … Continue reading »
The Man Who Stopped the Desert By: Janeen Madan
When Mark Dodd, an award-winning filmmaker visited Burkina Faso’s Yatenga province, he met Yacouba Sawadogo, a peasant farmer, whose life story Dodd felt compelled to share through film. Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer in Burkina Faso, has developed an innovative planting technique that is restoring degraded land across Africa’s Sahel region. (Photo credit: Center for International … Continue reading »
Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism? By: Andrew Rice
Dr. Robert Zeigler, an eminent American botanist, flew to Saudi Arabia in March for a series of high-level discussions about the future of the kingdom’s food supply. Saudi leaders were frightened: heavily dependent on imports, they had seen the price of rice and wheat, their dietary staples, fluctuate violently on the world market over the … Continue reading »
Slash-and-burn ‘improves tropical forest biodiversity’
Slash-and-burn ‘improves tropical forest biodiversity’ – SciDev.Net. Slash-and-burn agricultural practices, banned by governments because of the risk of uncontrolled fires, provide better growing conditions for valuable new trees than more modern methods of forestclearance, a study suggests. Starting in 1996, researchers cleared 24 half-hectare areas of tropical forest in Quintana Roo state, in southern Mexico, … Continue reading »
