Water and Food Security PIRE

 We are excited to announce that Dr. Mesfin M. Mekonnen from the University of Nebraska will visit UConn to give a talk on the relationship between consumption and water use. All are welcome to attend.

Date: March 24, 2016, 12:10pm

Location: F.L. Castleman, Room 212

Mesfin Mekonnen is a post-doctoral researcher at the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute at the University of Nebraska, working on water productivity assessment at different spatial scales. He holds an MSc degree (with distinction) in Environmental Science from UNESCO-IHE and a PhD degree in Water Footprint Assessment from University of Twente, The Netherlands. Mekonnen has extensive research experience on water footprint assessment, global water scarcity assessment and has published large number of articles in high impact journals. He co-developed the Globalization of Water Role Play.

National consumption depends on local water resources as well as on water resources outside the national borders. When water is used elsewhere for the production of commodities that are imported and consumed, consumers have a ´water footprint´ outside their national borders. Many countries have significantly externalized their water footprint (WF), without looking at whether the imported products are related to unsustainable water use in the producing countries. For example, 10% of the WF of Chinese consumers is outside China; in the US this is 20%; in Mexico 43%; and in the European countries like Italy, Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands even 60-95%. The presentation will give an overview of the global WF of production and consumption at high spatial resolution. We will further see the global WF maps for selected countries, showing for each country where in the world water resources are being consumed and polluted in relation to consumption of the country under consideration. By overlaying the global WF maps of selected countries with the global map showing the unsustainable water use, we quantified and mapped the unsustainable WF of countries, the commodities that are responsible for the unsustainable parts of a country’s WF and where these footprints are located.