Dietary changes could help India save water, reduce greenhouse gases
Residents of India should be changing their diets to help conserve water and decrease greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent study. This is the first study of the ramifications of people changing their food habits to conserve water.
The nation’s population is expected to rise to 1.6 billion by 2050. This increase in population (and increase in food demand) is projected to reduce available groundwater available by as much as 30 percent. To ensure an adequate water supply, current consumption should be cut by at least a third.
Agricultural Irrigation
By 2050, agricultural irrigation is expected to consume 70 percent of total water use in India, up from the current 50 percent. Researchers say both farming methods and diets must change to use less water.
The study’s lead author, James Milner of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told Reuters:
In India, the proportion of freshwater available for agricultural production may already be unsustainably high. […] Modest dietary changes could help meet the challenge of developing a resilient food system in the country.
Changing from meat, wheat, and dairy to more fruits, vegetables, and legumes, which require less water to grow, could be a significant help. Freshwater use could be reduced by up to 30 percent, he says, by such individual changes.
The researchers found:
These dietary changes could also simultaneously reduce diet-related greenhouse gas emissions and improve diet-related health outcomes.
More groundwater could be conserved with changes in the types of fruits consumed. For instance, growing melons, oranges, and papayas uses less water than growing popular choices such as grapes, guavas, and mangoes.
Greenhouse Gases
Making these changes could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 13 percent.
In 2011, India was the world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases from farming, behind China, Brazil and the United States, according to World Resources Institute statistics cited by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Most of this results from livestock manure and feed production.
Food System Resilience
Using improving agricultural technology could help the nation increase the resilience of its food system even more.
Saskia Heijnen, portfolio lead for The Wellcome Trust’s Our Planet, Our Health, which funded the work, said:
Over the last century, water usage has increased at twice the rate of population growth. […] We’re faced with the big problem of trying to produce more high-quality food but with less resource. This research shows that a sustainable diet could be created with a few relatively simple changes to current trends, and how this would help not only the planet but the health of people as well.
Researchers say the risk of disease — coronary heart disease in particular — could be reduced through dietary changes. They estimate these diets would result in an average gain of 6,800 life-years within 40 years.
The full results — “Projected Health Effects of Realistic Dietary Changes to Address Freshwater Constraints in India: A Modelling Study” — were published in The Lancet Planetary Health.
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