SOS.aquaterra project

The world’s population growth and climate change will represent further challenges for natural resources. Until now, scientists assess water and land scarcity separately.

The EU-funded SOS.aquaterra project will assess water and land scarcity together, aiming to identify vital standards to address future food demands and prevent water and land scarcity.

The project will develop innovative integrated modelling and data analysis methods to exploit together with the constantly growing global open spatio-temporal data sets the products from global agrological and hydrological models.

SOS.aquaterra will also develop an innovative integrated model to combine the possibilities of conventional and innovative measures.

Main objectives

SOS.aquaterra is motivated by the grand challenge of how to meet future food demand while staying within local and global safe operating spaces for exploited natural systems under rapid population growth and societal change, and is funded by an H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant.

The project pursues three concrete objectives: first, to develop a comprehensive integrated model to estimate local thresholds for water, land, nutrient, and biosphere integrity planetary boundaries and to quantify the safe operating space under future conditions; second, to quantitatively assess the combined potential of innovative and conventional food system solutions — such as diet change, food waste reduction, yield gap closure, vertical farming, and alternative proteins — within those safe operating spaces; and third, to assess the feasibility of future food opportunities based on how food solutions have been adopted in the past.

A key novelty of the project is its explicit treatment of interactions, feedbacks, and trade-offs between planetary boundary processes rather than assessing them in isolation.

Main results

The project has produced a substantial body of peer-reviewed publications. Key findings include research demonstrating that feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries (published in Nature Sustainability), as well as contributions to the scientific debate on revising the freshwater planetary boundary.

The team has also published work on global food trade and supply diversity, the water-energy-food nexus in China, cascading effects of agricultural shocks on global food systems, and the integration of the water planetary boundary into multi-scale management frameworks.

These outputs collectively advance the project’s goal of providing a systemic, integrated understanding of the global food system and its relationship to planetary limits.

Sos.aquaterra

Context

Main objectives

Main results

Website and resources

All projects

Sos.aquaterra

Context

Main objectives

Main results

Website and resources

All projects

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