Water and Food

A key challenge of this century will be to meet worldwide food demand while maintaining (or even enhancing) a healthy productive environment. Perhaps most notable of these challenges is meeting this demand when water resources are coming under increased pressure. Water is life, it’s personal and it’s the world’s most pressing conservation challenge. Agriculture is the biggest user of water in the world. 70% of the lower 48 states are private lands, most in agriculture. Demand for food is growing exponentially, both domestically and globally. With a growing world population of 9 billion and increased demands we will need to produce more food within the next generation than we have in the history of agriculture. This means we need better ways to conserve and protect our water resources – now.

The future of our supply of clean and abundant water is not assured. From coast to coast, the cost for our utilities to treat water is technologically daunting and unaffordable through existing financing mechanisms. Conventional strategies and financing alone will not solve the problems – and regulation will not stop pollution of our water supplies. We need to deploy new tools. 

Ecosystem Services Exchange Capacity

Ecosystem Services Exchange is dedicated to developing market-based solutions that lead to better conservation and land management practices. Ecosystem Services Exchange is working to bring initiatives and real markets into operation. We seek to improve water quality, reduce flooding, enhance wildlife habitat and support sustainable agriculture through innovative, cost-effective water management techniques. We support a conservation system that cost-effectively reduces nutrient loss from agricultural lands and quantifies the benefits in water quality improvement.

The cost of meeting water quality demands through partnerships with agriculture is a fraction of the cost of conventional brick and mortar strategies. In addition, by investing in upstream strategies the benefits of clean water are made available throughout a watershed instead of just downstream. But the key driver is that we can deliver higher quality water outcomes at a lower cost. We can select the most cost effective practices to manage ag waters to remove excess nutrients at the lowest cost. We can do this while maintaining and often improving agricultural productivity while enhancing habitat and other benefits to society.

Tangible, Measurable, Reliable Outcomes

Among Ecosystem Services Exchange’s core strengths is expertise and experience in the management of water that flows through agricultural production systems. By focusing on water in agricultural systems we can greatly reduce undesirable environmental outcomes such as sedimentation and nutrient loading of waterways, and in many cases improve agricultural productivity. Because we actively handle water through systems and management techniques we can directly quantify water quality improvements, and consistently deliver this information through easily verifiable, consistent systems.

Changes in water quality delivered through systems such as drainage water management, capturing and treating animal waste, bioreactors, phosphorous filters, wet buffers etc. can be directly monitored and measured and verified. These measurements are not some “guess” or “modeled outcome” but direct and reliable results that can be delivered to parties interested in improving environmental outcomes.

Ecosystem Services Exchange has capacity to deliver conservation planning, financing, implementation, and verification of improvements in water quality and other ecosystem benefits. We have mechanisms to support corporate, government, community and citizen involvement to meet these demands. We can then make these environmental improvements available to help more cost effectively meet water quality and other demands.