Zapata, JG;
Vangipuram, B;
Dalin, C;
Erfani, T;
(2022)
Water Quality and Pollution Trading: A Sustainable Solution for Future Food Production.
ACS ES&T Engineering
, 3
(8)
pp. 1112-1124.
10.1021/acsestengg.2c00383.
Preview |
Text
Dalin_Water Quality and Pollution Trading_VoR.pdf.pdf - Published Version Download (2MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Nitrogen, an essential nutrient for plant growth, is commonly added to food crops in the form of manure and synthetic fertilizers. Fertilizer use has significantly increased in the past decades to meet the food demands from a rising population. Although this has boosted food production, it has come at a cost to the environment. Indeed, excess fertilizer ends up in water bodies, a pollution that causes losses in aquatic biodiversity. Better fertilizer management is therefore essential to maintaining water sustainability. Here, we develop and evaluate a nitrogen water quality trading scheme to address this challenge. Nitrogen trading incentivizes farmers to work together to invest in pollution reduction measures in order to keep nitrogen water pollution levels within a standardized limit. We build a mathematical model to represent the nitrogen trading and use it to assess the pollution reduction, the effect on the crop yield, and economical outcomes. The model is applied among local farms in the agricultural county of Suffolk, eastern England. We calculate the nitrogen load to the river from each farm and incorporate the abatement cost into the model. The results show how nitrogen water pollution could be reduced cost-effectively while simultaneously increasing the benefit for the whole catchment. Although the benefit does not increase for all the farms, the increase in benefit for the whole catchment is enough to compensate for this loss. The surplus benefit is equally distributed between all the farms, thus increasing their overall benefit. We discuss how the proposed trading model can create a platform for farmers to participate and reduce their water pollution.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Water Quality and Pollution Trading: A Sustainable Solution for Future Food Production |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1021/acsestengg.2c00383 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1021/acsestengg.2c00383 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This is an Open Access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | Crops, Environmental modeling, Nitrogen, Redox reactions, Water pollution |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Bartlett School Env, Energy and Resources |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10175195 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
