scholarly journals Sustainability in Data and Food

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Allemang

As the world population continues to increase, world food production is not keeping up. This means that to continue to feed the world, we will need to optimize the production and utilization of food around the globe. Optimization of a process on a global scale requires massive data. Agriculture is no exception, but also brings its own unique issues, based on how wide spread agricultural data are, and the wide variety of data that is relevant to optimization of food production and supply. This suggests that we need a global data ecosystem for agriculture and nutrition. Such an ecosystem already exists to some extent, made up of data sets, metadata sets and even search engines that help to locate and utilize data sets. A key concept behind this is sustainability—how do we sustain our data sets, so that we can sustain our production and distribution of food? In order to make this vision a reality, we need to navigate the challenges for sustainable data management on a global scale. Starting from the current state of practice, how do we move forward to a practice in which we make use of global data to have an impact on world hunger? In particular, how do we find, collect and manage the data? How can this be effectively deployed to improve practice in the field? And how can we make sure that these practices are leading to the global goals of improving production, distribution and sustainability of the global food supply? These questions cannot be answered yet, but they are the focus of ongoing and future research to be published in this journal and elsewhere.

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Niels Dybro ◽  
Alan Christopher Hansen

Agribusinesses are investigating sustainable ways to meet the predicted increased demand for food production due to an increasing world population and higher living standards. Therefore, there is a strong need to increase agronomic output. This paper will review the current state of agricultural production of the main annual top-five staple grain crops grown around the world, their current yields and harvested area averages and trends. It concludes with a discussion of which changes are needed to increase the yield in lower yielding areas of the world. Finally, there is an assessment of what level of yield increases that could be attained provided the proposed changes are made and its predicted impact on food security by 2050.The current yield trends and trends for harvested area, when extrapolated out to 2050, indicate crop production will increase 106%. This includes an expansion of the total crop production area by 31%. This increase of cropping area can be achieved by increased utilization of available, uncropped land suitable for crop production, increased double cropping, and relay intercropping, allowing for multiple crops in a calendar year.In order to double crop production by 2050, it is necessary to focus on growing crops where the conditions make it possible, adopt the best sustainable crop production practices and implement them as intensively as possible everywhere, and consider improved crop production machine system options to reduce risk of soil compaction, which can reduce crop yields.With proposed changes across the world, it will be possible to exceed a doubling of food production by 2050 relative to 2005 levels, providing a reasonable high level of food security, absent wars and widespread natural disasters.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Ghislain de Marsily

In 2000, the World population was 6.2 billion; it reached 7 billion in 2012 and should reach 9.5 billion (±0.4) in 2050 and 11 billion (±1.5) in 2100, according to UN projections. The trend after 2100 is still one of global demographic growth, but after 2060, Africa would be the only continent where the population would still increase. The amount of water consumed annually to produce the food necessary to meet the needs varies greatly between countries, from about 600 to 2,500 m<sup>3</sup>/year per capita, depending on their wealth, their food habits (particularly meat consumption), and the percentage of food waste they generate. In 2000, the total food production was on the order of 3,300 million tons (in cereal equivalents). In 2019, about 0.8 billion inhabitants of the planet still suffer from hunger and do not get the nutrition they need to be in good health or, in the case of children, to grow properly (both physically and intellectually). Assuming a World average water consumption for food of 1,300 m<sup>3</sup>/year per capita in 2000, 1,400 m<sup>3</sup>/year in 2050, and 1,500 m<sup>3</sup>/year in 2100, a volume of water of around 8,200 km<sup>3</sup>/year was needed in 2000, 13,000 km<sup>3</sup>/year will be needed in 2050, and 16,500 km<sup>3</sup>/year in 2100. Will that much water be available on earth? Can there be conflicts related to a food deficit? Some preliminary answers and scenarios for food production will be given from a hydrologist viewpoint.


2021 ◽  
pp. 118-128
Author(s):  
Tetiana ZATONATSKA ◽  
Olena VOLVACH

Introduction. Today, almost the only industry in the country that Ukraine can really be proud of and which is considered one of the most technologically advanced in the world is the development of card technologies, payment technologies and card infrastructure. The purpose of the article is to analyze the current state of electronic payment systems in Ukraine and highlight development trends. Results. The modern fintech directions in Ukraine are analyzed and examples of the impact of COVID-19 on the market of electronic payment systems for the last period are given. A number of trends are highlighted for further research in the field of electronic payment systems, which are now quite promising. Perspectives. Given the significant increase in non-cash payments, the problem of developing financial technologies and spreading awareness among the population has become especially urgent. It is necessary to improve not only the financial technologies themselves, but also the ways of providing them to clients and promoting modern financial technologies. Electronic payment systems can still be considered one of the most promising areas for future research.


Author(s):  
Natan Mikhailovich Rutkin ◽  
Oleg Yurievich Lagutkin ◽  
Lina Yurievna Lagutkina

The outlook of the development of world urban agrotechnologies ("city-farming") by means of key innovation technological and market trends analysis has been researched. It is noted that the tendencies to reduction of the area of productive lands, exhausting ecosystem resources, including World ocean resources, harmful consequences of the climate changing are the main limiting factors of the development of traditional agriculture and supplying food products to the growing population of the world. The remote territories of mass food production from the mass markets result in a large amount of waste products (food losses) in supply chains, along with decreasing product quality and raising costs. Growth of the world population, increasing concentration of urban citizens along with changing of consumers’ food preferences towards "health", "natural", "organic" food bring up the development of an additional, or alternate, system of uninterrupted supply or self-provision of cities with food products, ensuring future food security. The article highlights the prospect of developing the international branch of agriculture in terms of its transition to the high-tech stage of development ("AgTech"), and reviews the innovation technologies inseparable from that transition. It has been found that the development of the urban agrotechnologies (city-farming), as a combination of innovative high-performance agro-practices of the food production in urban environment, can step up the level of food security due to increasing food availability in qualitative and quantitative aspects. The review of main city-farming technologies in accordance with directions of its practical applications was done for the first time. The conception "urban agrotechnologies" ("city-farming") has been defined as the scientific term.


AI and Ethics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Ryan ◽  
Simone van der Burg ◽  
Marc-Jeroen Bogaardt

AbstractAgribusinesses are investing in different forms of AI robots, as there is a lot of hope that these machines will help meet the challenges within the agricultural industry, which is to efficiently produce more food for a growing world population. AI robots are expected to enhance production, while compensating for lack of manpower, reducing production costs, taking over unattractive (risky, heavy, and dirty) jobs and reducing the burden of food production on the environment. In spite of these promises, however, AI robots for agri-food also give rise to ethical questions and concerns, which have been little researched and discussed until now. To fill this gap, we developed a research agenda for future research in this area. To do this, we opened our analysis to focus on ethics AI robots generally to specifically identify which of these issues are most relevant to agro-robots. The question we want to find an answer to is: what are the most relevant ethical questions raised about AI robots for robots developed for the agri-food sector? And which questions are not mentioned in the literature, which are particularly relevant for agro-robots? Our paper will provide an overview over the key issues and areas which deserve further elaboration to come to a more mature ethics of AI agro-robots.


Author(s):  
Indrajit Ghosh ◽  
Tanujit Chakraborty

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is one of the major health emergencies in decades that affected almost every country in the world. As of June 30, 2020, it has caused an outbreak with more than 10 million confirmed infections, and more than 500,000 reported deaths globally. Due to the unavailability of an effective treatment (or vaccine) and insufficient evidence regarding the transmission mechanism of the epidemic, the world population is currently in a vulnerable position. The daily cases data sets of COVID-19 for profoundly affected countries represent a stochastic process comprised of deterministic and stochastic components. This study proposes an integrated deterministic–stochastic approach to forecast the long-term trajectories of the COVID-19 cases for Italy and Spain. The deterministic component of the daily-cases univariate time series is assessed by an extended version of the SIR [Susceptible–Infected–Recovered–Protected–Isolated (SIRCX)] model, whereas its stochastic component is modeled using an autoregressive (AR) time series model. The proposed integrated SIRCX-AR (ISA) approach based on two operationally distinct modeling paradigms utilizes the superiority of both the deterministic SIRCX and stochastic AR models to find the long-term trajectories of the epidemic curves. Experimental analysis based on the proposed ISA model shows significant improvement in the long-term forecasting of COVID-19 cases for Italy and Spain in comparison to the ODE-based SIRCX model. The estimated Basic reproduction numbers for Italy and Spain based on SIRCX model are found to be [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], respectively. ISA model-based results reveal that the number of cases in Italy and Spain between 11 May, 2020–9 June, 2020 will be 10,982 (6383–15,582) and 13,731 (3395–29,013), respectively. Additionally, the expected number of daily cases on 9 July, 2020 for Italy and Spain is estimated to be 30 (0–183) and 92 (0–602), respectively.


2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irfan Ullah ◽  
Shah Khusro ◽  
Asim Ullah ◽  
Muhammad Naeem

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a core Semantic Web technology that makes knowledge and information spaces of different knowledge domains manageable, reusable, shareable, exchangeable, and interoperable. The LOD approach achieves this through the provision of services for describing, indexing, organizing, and retrievingknowledge artifacts and making them available for quick consumption and publication. Thisis also alignedwith the role and objective of traditional library cataloging. Owing to this link, majorlibraries of the world are transferring their bibliographic metadata to the LOD landscape. Some developments in this direction include the replacement of Anglo-American Cataloging Rules 2nd Edition by the Resource Description and Access (RDA) and the trend towards the wideradoption of BIBFRAME 2.0. An interestingand related development in this respect arethe discussions among knowledge resources managers and library community on the possibility of enriching bibliographic metadata with socially curated or user-generated content. The popularity of Linked Open Data and its benefit to librarians and knowledge management professionals warrant a comprehensive survey of the subject. Althoughseveral reviews and survey articles on the application of Linked Data principles to cataloging have appeared in literature, a generic yet holistic review of the current state of Linked and Open Data in cataloging is missing. To fill the gap, the authors have collected recent literature (2014–18) on the current state of Linked Open Data in cataloging to identify research trends, challenges, and opportunities in this area and, in addition, to understand the potential of socially curated metadata in cataloging mainlyin the realm of the Web of Data. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this review article is the first of its kind that holistically treats the subject of cataloging in the Linked and Open Data environment. Some of the findings of the review are: Linked and Open Data is becoming the mainstream trend in library cataloging especially in the major libraries and research projects of the world; with the emergence of Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV), the bibliographic metadata is becoming more meaningful and reusable; and, finally, enriching bibliographic metadata with user-generated content is gaining momentum.Conclusions drawn from the study include the need for a focus on the quality of catalogued knowledge and the reduction of the barriers to the publication and consumption of such knowledge, and the attention on the part of library community to the learning from the successful adoption of LOD in other application domains and contributing collaboratively to the global scale activity of cataloging.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Kenney ◽  
John Zysman

Abstract The platform economy and its leading firms, such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, are reorganising the geography of value creation and capture on both a local and global scale. This article argues that economic geographers have underappreciated the implications of the platform on space. First, we demonstrate the concentration of platform giants in terms of location on the US West Coast and in terms of their market share in various services, such as search, maps and online sales. Platforms are simultaneously intermediaries, two-sided markets, data aggregators and leading users of artificial intelligence (AI). Second, we use a labour taxonomy to demonstrate the extensive reach of these platforms in terms of the labour markets that they serve and shape. To illustrate these changes in the geography of value creation, we present case studies of Amazon and Google Maps to show their effects on the location of economic activity. Third, we elaborate on our contention that platforms are at once intermediaries and data hubs. AI is likely to reinforce the power of these platform leaders because they have the largest data sets, the most computational power, enormous teams of the best AI researchers and vast reservoirs of capital that they can use to make acquisitions. We conclude by identifying areas for future research and calling upon economic geographers to consider the implications of the platform economy in reshaping the space of economic activity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 422-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahaf M. Ajaj ◽  
Suzan M. Shahin ◽  
Mohammed A. Salem

Climate change and global warming became a real concern for global food security. The world population explosion is a critical factor that results in enormous emissions of greenhouse gasses (GHGs), required to cover the growing demands of fresh water, food, and shelter. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a significant oil-producing country, which is included in the list of 55 countries that produce at least 55% of the world’s GHGs and thus involved in the top 30 countries over the world with emission deficits. At the same time, the UAE is located in an arid region of the world, with harsh environmental conditions. The sharp population increases and the massive growth in the urbanization are primary sources, lead to further stresses on the agricultural sector. Thus, the future of the food production industry in the country is a challenging situation. Consequently, the primary objective of this work is to shed light on the current concerns related to climate change and food security, through describing the implications of climate change on the food production sector of the UAE. Tailored solutions that can rescue the future of food security in the country are also highlighted.


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