Publication Date:
2016-07-25
Description:
Global consumption of farming commodities is an important driver of water demand in regions of production. This is the case in Brazil, which has emerged as one of the main producers of globally traded farming commodities. Traditional methods to assess environmental implications of this demand rely on international trade material flows at country resolution; we argue for the need of finer scales that capture spatial heterogeneity in environmental variables in the regions of production, and that account for differential sourcing within the borders of a country of production. To illustrate this, we obtain virtual water flows from Brazilian municipalities to countries of consumption, by allocating high-resolution water footprints of sugarcane and soy production to spatially-explicit material trade flows. We found that this approach results in differences of virtual water use estimations of over 20% when compared to approaches that disregard spatial heterogeneity in sourcing patterns...
Print ISSN:
1748-9318
Electronic ISSN:
1748-9326
Topics:
Biology
,
Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering