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SUMMARY:EESS talk on "Balancing Food and Water: Trade-offs in Land and Irr
 igation Investments in the Global South"
DTSTART:20250923T121500
DTEND:20250923T131500
DTSTAMP:20260316T100144Z
UID:a48f220e53f474b0edfc432394f8ce5b82498df0d333900d78539d72
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Marc Müller\, Eawag\nAbstract:\n\n\nSustainable Develop
 ment Goals are full of synergies but also trade-offs\, especially when it 
 comes to food and water. Irrigation is often promoted to boost production 
 and nutrition\, yet its local impacts depend on who benefits and how scarc
 e water is.  We first use large-scale land acquisitions as a natural exp
 eriment: analyzing over 400 land deals\, we find that while production inc
 reases\, water scarcity worsens and diets in local communities actually of
 ten declineas land shifts to export crops. Expanding the analysis to the 
 global scale\, we show that irrigation generally improves diets\, but the 
 benefits are strongest under water stress. This reveals a counterintuitive
  and previously undocumented trade-off between food and water security. Re
 turning to the natural experiment to probe mechanisms\, we find that nutri
 tion outcomes vary sharply across types of land deals: some raise incomes 
 and improve diets\, while others reduce access to micronutrients. These pa
 tterns are consistent with a dynamic in which irrigation investments by ex
 port-oriented agribusiness predominantly target water-secure land\, effect
 ively crowding out locally consumed crops. Together\, these findings highl
 ight the need for policies that pair irrigation with nutrition-sensitive i
 ncentives and stronger protection of water rights. In this context\, I clo
 se by drawing on our work within an ongoing UN FAO initiative to character
 ize and safeguard water tenure\, a critical but often overlooked foundatio
 n of equitable and sustainable water governance.\n\n\n\n\n\nBiography:\n\n
 \n\nMarc F. Müller heads the Coupled Human-Water Systems group at Eawag. 
 His research examines how geopolitical shocks\, land acquisitions\, and wa
 ter interventions shape food and water security. He combines hydrological 
 and behavioral modeling\, econometrics\, and remote sensing to study coope
 ration\, conflict\, and trade-offs in sustainable food and water systems. 
 Marc previously served as an Associate Professor at the University of Notr
 e Dame (USA)\, he is a Research Associate Professor at the United Nations 
 University Institute for Water\, the Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH)\, 
 and contributes to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization expert group o
 n water tenure. He holds a MSc from EPFL\, a PhD from UC Berkeley\, and ha
 s carried out postdoctoral research at Stanford University.\n\n
LOCATION:GC B1 10 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==GC%20B1%2010 https://epfl.zo
 om.us/j/69011077410
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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