This collaborative cross-city project identifies how our food systems, in any country, can cope and transform in response to the emerging global phosphorus challenge.
This will ultimately transform cities from being huge polluters and consumers of finite resources, to producers of renewable fertilizers, ensuring both our farmers can feed our population and our water is clean for drinking, biodiversity and recreation.
Mining phosphate rock: a scarce global resource
Without phosphorus, we cannot produce food. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for plant growth, used in fertilizers to ensure high crop yields. All farmers and countries need access to phosphorus to produce food, however there is a limited amount of finite phosphate rock globally and it is mined in only a few countries. Morocco alone controls 75% of the world’s remaining phosphate reserves. Global phosphorus demand is increasing to feed more mouths and changing diets, and is expected to surpass supply in the coming decades. Cheap fertilizers will be a thing of the past.
At the same time, four-fifths of phosphorus mined is lost along the food chain from mine to field to fork, contributing to widespread nutrient pollution of the world’s water bodies.
The implications of global phosphorus scarcity for food security is emerging as one of the biggest global sustainability challenges this century, yet there are no effective global or local governance mechanisms in place to ensure long-term access to the resource and to stimulate and support sustainable phosphorus practices.
Ultimately, achieving phosphorus security is about ensuring farmers have access to fertilizers to produce food, agricultural soils are fertile, the global population’s nutritional security needs are met, rural livelihoods are supported and our water is protected from nutrient runoff. This means ensuring phosphorus is available and accessible in the short and long term, that it is used efficiently and effectively and that its use is supported by effective governance mechanisms.
Tensions and opportunities among urbanization,
water and agriculture in Hanoi, Vietnam.
More than half the world’s population already live in cities – demanding food, water, housing, jobs and putting huge pressures on existing land, energy, transport systems and other resources. This has led to pollution, insecurity of tenure and congestion in many cities.
Cities, as centres of food consumption and waste generation, can play a key role in more sustainable management of phosphorus. For example, efficiently capturing phosphorus from wastewater and food waste for reuse as renewable fertilizers in peri-urban agriculture.
We are now inviting funding partners for Phase 2. If you are interested in this opportunity, please contact Dr Dana Cordell (Dana.Cordell@uts.edu.au).
Phase I of P-FUTURES is funded by the Swedish International Development Agency under the International Social Science Council’s Transformations to Sustainability programme – a contribution to Future Earth. Supplementary support for seed grants is provided by the Swedish Secretariat for Environmental Earth System Sciences (SSEESS), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) UK through the Newton Fund and the National Research Foundation of South Africa
