NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Food security

Food security describes a situation in which people do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. World-wide around 852 million men, women and children are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty; while up to 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty. (source: FAO, 2003). Image File history File links Size of this preview: 800 Ã— 531 pixels Full resolution (898 Ã— 596 pixel, file size: 80 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) This work is copyrighted and unlicensed. ... Image File history File links Size of this preview: 800 Ã— 531 pixels Full resolution (898 Ã— 596 pixel, file size: 80 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) This work is copyrighted and unlicensed. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... A female child during the Nigerian-Biafran war of the late 1960s, shown suffering the effects of severe hunger and malnutrition. ... Extreme poverty is the most severe state of poverty, where people cannot meet basic needs for survival, such as food, water, clothing, shelter, sanitation, education and health care. ... A boy from an East Cipinang trash dump slum in Jakarta, Indonesia shows what he found. ... Possible meanings: Faro Airport (Portugal) Federation of Astrobiology Organizations Financial Aid Office Food and Agriculture Organization This page expands a three-character combination which might be any or all of: an abbreviation, an acronym, an initialism, a word in English, or a word in another language. ...

A direct relationship exists between food consumption levels and poverty. Families with the financial resources to escape extreme poverty rarely suffer from chronic hunger; while poor families not only suffer the most from chronic hunger, but are also the segment of the population most at risk during food shortages and famines. A famine is a social and economic crisis that is commonly accompanied by widespread malnutrition, starvation, epidemic and increased mortality. ...

Two commonly used definitions of food security come from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA): This article is about the United Nations, for other uses of UN see UN (disambiguation) Official languages English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic Secretary-General Kofi Annan (since 1997) Established October 24, 1945 Member states 191 Headquarters New York City, NY, USA Official site http://www. ... The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. ... The United States Department of Agriculture (also called the Agriculture Department, or USDA) is a United States Federal Executive Department (or Cabinet Department). ...

The stages of food insecurity range from food secure situations to full-scale famine. "Famine and hunger are both rooted in food insecurity. Food insecurity can be categorized as either chronic or transitory. Chronic food insecurity translates into a high degree of vulnerability to famine and hunger; ensuring food security presupposes elimination of that vulnerability. [Chronic] hunger is not famine. It is similar to undernourishment and is related to poverty. [It exists] mainly in poor countries." Melaku Ayalew – What is Food Security and Famine and Hunger? Famine scales are the ways in which degrees of food security are measured, from situations in which an entire population has adequate food to full-scale famine. ...

Food insecurity

Food insecurity has been described as "a condition in which people lack basic food intake to provide them with the energy and nutrients for fully productive lives." Hunger Task Force

Food insecurity is defined as not having access to enough food every day of the year. The U.S. federal government collects statistics on this based on surveys.Household Food Security in the United States, 2004

Thus a "food insecure household" is one in which any member experienced one or more days in a given year when they didn't have enough food because of poverty or a lack of resources. This poverty measure takes into account participation in food assistance programs such as school breakfast, school lunch and Food Stamps. A school dinner is a meal (dinner or lunch) provided to students at a school. ... The Food Stamp Program serves as the first line of defense against hunger. ...

The USDA report cited below asks the question, "How often were people hungry in households that were food insecure with hunger?" Around 4 percent of people reported going hungry at least once a year, while on any given day the figure is estimated to be between 0.5 percent and 0.8 percent. [2]

Stunting and chronic nutritional deficiencies

Many countries experience perpetual food shortages and distribution problems. These result in chronic and often widespread hunger amongst significant numbers of people. Human populations respond to chronic hunger and malnutrition by decreasing body size, known in medical terms as stunting or stunted growth. This process starts in utero if the mother is malnourished and continues through approximately the third year of life. It leads to higher infant and child mortality, but at rates far lower than during famines. Once stunting has occurred, improved nutritional intake later in life cannot reverse the damage. Stunting itself is viewed as a coping mechanism, designed to bring body size into alignment with the calories available during adulthood in the location where the child is born. Limiting body size as a way of adapting to low levels of energy (calories) adversely affects health in three ways: This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ...

"The analysis ... points to the misleading nature of the concept of subsistence as Malthus originally used it and as it is still widely used today. Subsistence in not located at the edge of a nutritional cliff, beyond which lies demographic disaster. Rather than one level of subsistence, there are numerous levels at which a population and a food supply can be in equilibrium in the sense that they can be indefinitely sustained. However, some levels will have smaller people and higher normal mortality than others." Robert Fogel – The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death: 1700-2100; Cambridge University Press, 2004 Robert William Fogel (born July 1, 1926) is an American economic historian and scientist, and winner (with Douglass North) of the 1993 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. ...

Dictatorship and kleptocracy

As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has observed that "there is no such thing as an apolitical food problem." While drought and other naturally occurring events may trigger famine conditions, it is government action or inaction that determines its severity, and often even whether or not a famine will occur. The 20th century is full of examples of governments undermining the food security of their own nations – sometimes intentionally. Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ... The Nobel Prizes (Swedish: ) are awards in physics, chemistry, literature, peace, physiology or medicine. ... Amartya Sen Amartya Kumar Sen CH (Hon) (Bengali: Ã”morto Kumar Shen) (born 3 November 1933 in Santiniketan, India), is an Indian philosopher, economist and a winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (Nobel Prize for Economics) in 1998, for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare...

Socialist anti-Western governments do this much more than authoritarian, pro-Western ones. Prime examples are North Korea since 1980, and the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century. Lesser known are Cambodia under Pol Pot, and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in their attempt to starve the Misquito Indians into submission.

When governments come to power by force or rigged elections, and not by way of fair and open elections, their base of support is often narrow and built upon cronyism and patronage. Under such conditions "The distribution of food within a country is a political issue. Governments in most countries give priority to urban areas, since that is where the most influential and powerful families and enterprises are usually located. The government often neglects subsistence farmers and rural areas in general. The more remote and underdeveloped the area the less likely the government will be to effectively meet its needs. Many agrarian policies, especially the pricing of agricultural commodities, discriminate against rural areas. Governments often keep prices of basic grains at such artificially low levels that subsistence producers can not accumulate enough capital to make investments to improve their production. Thus, they are effectively prevented from getting out of their precarious situation." Fred Cuny – Famine, Conflict, and Response: a Basic Guide; Kumarian Press, 1999. An election is a decision making process whereby people vote for preferred political candidates or parties to act as representatives in government. ... Crony redirects here. ... Generally, patronage is the act of a so-called patron who supports or favors some individual, family, group or institution. ... Frederick C. Cuny (born November 14, 1944 in New Haven, Connecticut) was an American disaster relief specialist who was active in many humanitarian projects around the world from 1969 until his forced disappearance in Chechnya in 1995. ...

Further Communist parties, as well as dictators and warlords have used food as a political weapon, rewarding their supporters while denying food supplies to areas that oppose their rule. Under such conditions food becomes a currency with which to buy support and famine becomes an effective weapon to be used against the opposition. A Communist party is a party which promotes Communism. ... Dictator was the title of a magistrate in ancient Rome appointed by the Senate to rule the state in times of emergency. ... Warlords may refer to: The plural of Warlord, a name for a figure who has military authority but not legal authority over a subnational region. ...

Governments with strong tendencies towards kleptocracy can undermine food security even when harvests are good. When government monopolizes trade, farmers may find that they are free to grow cash crops for export, but under penalty of law only able to sell their crops to government buyers at prices far below the world market price. The government then is free to sell their crop on the world market at full price, pocketing the difference. This creates an artificial "poverty trap" from which even the most hard working and motivated farmers may not escape. Kleptocracy (sometimes Cleptocracy) (root: Klepto+cracy = rule by thieves) is a pejorative, informal term for a government that is primarily designed to sustain the personal wealth and political power of government officials and their cronies (collectively, kleptocrats). ...

When the rule of law is absent, or private property is non-existent, farmers have little incentive to improve their productivity. If a farm becomes noticeably more productive than neighboring farms, it may become the target of individuals well connected to the government. Rather than risk being noticed and possibly losing their land, farmers may be content with the perceived safety of mediocrity. The rule of law is the principle that governmental authority is legitimately exercised only in accordance with written, publicly disclosed laws adopted and enforced in accordance with established procedure. ... This page deals with property as ownership rights. ...

As pointed out by William Bernstein in his book The Birth of Plenty: "Individuals without property are susceptible to starvation, and it is much easier to bend the fearful and hungry to the will of the state. If a [farmer's] property can be arbitrarily threatened by the state, that power will inevitably be employed to intimidate those with divergent political and religious opinions."

Economic approaches

There are many economic approaches advocated to improve food security in developing countries. Three typical approaches are listed below. The first is typical of what is advocated by most governments and international agencies. The other two are more common to non-governmental organizations (NGO’s). The term non-governmental organization (NGO) is used in a variety of ways all over the world and, depending on the context in which it is used, can refer to many different types of organizations. ...

Westernized view

Conventional thinking in westernized countries is that maximizing the farmers profit is the surest way of maximizing agricultural production; the higher a farmer’s profit, the greater the effort that will be forthcoming, and the greater the risk the farmer is willing to take.^{[citation needed]}

This view holds that it is the governments job to place into the hands of farmers the largest number and highest quality tools possible (tools is used here to refer to improved production techniques, improved seeds, secure land tenure, accurate weather forecasts, etc.) However, it is left to the individual farmer to pick and choose which tools to use, and how to use them, as farmers have intimate knowledge of their own land and local conditions.

As with other businesses, a percentage of the profits are normally reinvested into the business in the hopes of increasing production, and hence increase future profits. Normally higher profits translate into higher spending on technologies designed to boost production, such as drip irrigation systems, agriculture education, and greenhouses. An increased profit also increases the farmer’s incentive to engage in double-cropping, soil improvement programs, and expanding usable acreage. Drip Irrigation - A dripper in action Main article: Irrigation Drip irrigation also known as trickle irrigation or microirrigation is an irrigation method that applies water slowly to the roots of plants, by depositing the water either on the soil surface or directly to the root zone, through a network of... A greenhouse in Saint Paul, Minnesota. ... In agriculture, multiple cropping is the practice of growing two or more crops simultaneously in the same space during a single growing season. ... For the American hard rock band, see Soil (band). ...

Food justice

An alternative view takes a collective approach to achieve food security. It notes that globally enough food is produced to feed the entire world population at a level adequate to ensure that everyone can be free of hunger and fear of starvation. That no one should live without enough food because of economic constraints or social inequalities is the basic goal.

This approach is often referred to as food justice and views food security as a basic human right. It advocates fairer distribution of food, particularly grain crops, as a means of ending chronic hunger and malnutrition. The core of the Food Justice movement is the belief that what is lacking is not food, but the political will to fairly distribute food regardless of the recipient’s ability to pay. Human rights are rights which some hold to be inalienable and belonging to all humans. ... Malnutrition is a general term for the medical condition caused by an improper or insufficient diet. ...

Food sovereignty

A third approach is known as food sovereignty; though it overlaps with food justice on several points, the two are not identical. It views the business practices of multinational corporations as a form of neocolonialism. It contends that multinational corporations have the financial resources available to buy up the agricultural resources of impoverished nations, particularly in the tropics. They also have the political clout to convert these resources to the exclusive production of cash crops for sale to industrialized nations outside of the tropics, and in the process to squeeze the poor off of the more productive lands. Under this view subsistence farmers are left to cultivate only lands that are so marginal in terms of productivity as to be of no interest to the multinational corporations. Food sovereignty is a term originally coined by members of Via Campesina in 1996 to refer to a concept advocated by a number of farmers, peasants, and fishermens organizations, namely the claimed right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture, in contrast to having food largely subject... Definition from Oxford English Dictionary: The use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence another country; esp. ... In agriculture, a cash crop is a crop which is sold for money. ... A developed country enjoys a relatively high standard of living through a strong high-technology diversified economy. ... A noontime scene from the Philippines on a day when the sun is almost directly overhead. ... Like most farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, this Cameroonian man cultivates at the subsistence level. ...

It advocates banning the production of most cash crops in developing nations, thereby leaving the local farmers to concentrate on subsistence crops. In addition it opposes allowing low-cost subsidized food from industrialized nations into developing countries, what is referred to as "import dumping".

World Food Summit

The World Food Summit was held in Rome in 1996, with the aim of renewing global commitment to the fight against hunger. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) called the summit in response to widespread under-nutrition and growing concern about the capacity of agriculture to meet future food needs. The conference produced two key documents, the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action. Nickname: The Eternal City Motto: SPQR: Senatus PopulusQue Romanus Location of the city of Rome (yellow) within the Province of Rome (red) and region of Lazio (grey) Coordinates: Region Lazio Province Province of Rome Founded 21 April 753 BC - Mayor Walter Veltroni Area - City 1285 kmÂ² (580 sq mi) - Urban... 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. ... The foundation of the U.N. The United Nations (UN) is an international organization whose stated aims are to facilitate co-operation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress and human rights issues. ...

The Rome Declaration calls for the members of the United Nations to work to halve the number of chronically undernourished people on the Earth by the year 2015. The Plan of Action sets a number of targets for government and non-governmental organizations for achieving food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels. A non-governmental organization (NGO) is an organization which is not a part of a government. ...

Achieving food security

"The number of people without enough food to eat on a regular basis remains stubbornly high, at over 800 million, and is not falling significantly. Over 60% of the world's undernourished people live in Asia, and a quarter in Africa. The proportion of people who are hungry, however, is greater in Africa (33%) than Asia (16%). The latest FAO figures indicate that there are 22 countries, 16 of which are in Africa, in which the undernourishment prevalence rate is over 35%." – Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

USAID [3] proposes several key steps to increasing agricultural productivity which is in turn key to increasing rural income and reducing food insecurity. They include: World GDP/capita changed very little for most of human history before the industrial revolution. ... Farmlands in Hebei province, China. ... Human population increase from 10,000 BC â€“ 2000 AD. Population growth is change in population over time, and can be quantified as the change in the number of individuals in a population per unit time. ... Species Human immunodeficiency virus 1 Human immunodeficiency virus 2 Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS, a condition in humans in which the immune system begins to fail, leading to life-threatening opportunistic infections). ... USAID logo The United States Agency for International Development (or USAID) is the U.S. government organization responsible for most non-military foreign aid. ...

The First Millennium Development Goal is to Eradicate extreme hunger and poverty, and agricultural productivity is likely to play a key role if it is to be reached on time. Agricultural science is a broad multidisciplinary field that encompasses the parts of exact, natural, economic, and social sciences that are used in the practice and understanding of agriculture. ... Human capital is a way of defining and categorizing the skills and abilities as used in employment and as they otherwise contribute to the economy. ...

"Of the eight Millennium Development Goals, eradicating extreme hunger and poverty depends on agriculture the most. (MDG 1 calls for halving hunger and poverty by 2015 in relation to 1990.)

The agriculture-hunger-poverty nexus

Eradicating hunger and poverty requires an understanding of the ways in which these two injustices interconnect. Hunger, and the malnourishment that accompanies it, prevents poor people from escaping poverty because it diminishes their ability to learn, work, and care for themselves and their family members.Food insecurity exists when people are undernourished as a result of the physical unavailability of food, their lack of social or economic access to adequate food, and/or inadequate food utilization. Food-insecure people are those individuals whose food intake falls below their minimum calorie (energy) requirements, as well as those who exhibit physical symptoms caused by energy and nutrient deficiencies resulting from an inadequate or unbalanced diet or from the body's inability to use food effectively because of infection or disease. An alternative view would define the concept of food insecurity as referring only to the consequence of inadequate consumption of nutritious food, considering the physiological utilization of food by the body as being within the domain of nutrition and health .malnourishment also leads to poor health hence indviduals fail to provide for their families .If left unaddressed, hunger sets in motion an array of outcomes that perpetuate malnutrition, reduce the ability of adults to work and to give birth to healthy children, and erode children's ability to learn and lead productive, healthy, and happy lives. This truncation of human development undermines a country's potential for economic development – for generations to come.

There are strong, direct relationships between agricultural productivity, hunger, and poverty. Three-quarters of the world's poor live in rural areas and make their living from agriculture. Hunger and child malnutrition are greater in these areas than in urban areas. Moreover, the higher the proportion of the rural population that obtains its income solely from subsistence farming (without the benefit of pro-poor technologies and access to markets), the higher the incidence of malnutrition. Therefore, improvements in agricultural productivity aimed at small-scale farmers will benefit the rural poor first.

Increased agricultural productivity enables farmers to grow more food, which translates into better diets and, under market conditions that offer a level playing field, into higher farm incomes. With more money, farmers are more likely to diversify production and grow higher-value crops, benefiting not only themselves but the economy as a whole." Agriculture, Food Security, Nutrition and the Millennium Development Goals 2003-2004 IFPRI Annual Report Essay Joachim von Braun, M. S. Swaminathan, and Mark W. Rosegrant

Biotechnology for smallholders in the (sub)tropics

The area sown to genetically enhanced crops in developing countries is rapidly catching-up with the area sown in industrial nations. According to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), genetically enhanced (biotech, GM) crops were grown by approximately 8.5 million farmers in 21 countries in 2005, up from 8.25 million farmers in 17 countries in 2004. The largest increase in biotech crop area in any country in 2005 was in Brazil, provisionally estimated at 44,000 km² (94,000 km² in 2005 compared with 50,000 km² in 2004. India had by far the largest year-on-year proportional increase, with almost a threefold increase from 5,000 km² in 2004 to 13,000 km² in 2005 ^[2].

Current high regulatory costs imposed on varieties created by the more modern methods are a significabt hurdle for development of genetically enhanced crops well suited to developing country farmers by modern genetic methods. Once a new variety is developed, however, seed provides a good vehicle for distribution of improvements in a package that is familiar to the farmer.

Currently there are some institutes and research groups that have projects in which biotechnology is shared with contact people in less-developed countries on a non-profit basis. These institutes make use of biotechnological methods that do not involve high research and registration costs, such as conservation and multiplication of germplasm and phytosanitation. Germplasm is a term used to describe the genetic resources, or more precisely the DNA of an organism and collections of that material. ...

See also

The 2020 Vision Initiative in an initiative if the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). ... A typical allotment plot, Essex, England Allotment gardens are characterized by a concentration in one place of a few or up to several hundreds of land parcels that are assigned to individual families. ... The Community Food Security Coalition is a North American non-profit dedicated to the growth of urban agriculture for health, social, and environmental reasons. ... The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was created by the World Bank on May 19, 1971, with the FAO, IFAD and UNDP as co-sponsors. ... The Green Revolution is a term used to describe the transformation of agriculture in many developing nations that led to significant increases in agricultural production between the 1940s and 1960s. ... Ecological Sanitation One person produces about 500 litres of urine and only 50 litres of faeces per year. ... This article is about International Development. ... Categories: Possible copyright violations ... Land reform (also agrarian reform, though that can have a broader meaning) is an often-controversial type of government-initiated or government-backed real estate property redistribution, generally of agricultural land. ... Norman Ernest Borlaug (born March 25, 1914) is an American agricultural scientist, humanitarian, Nobel laureate, and has been called the father of the Green Revolution[1]. Borlaug received his Ph. ... Urban (or peri-urban) agriculture is the practice of agriculture (including crops, livestock, fisheries, and forestry activities) within or surrounding the boundaries of cities. ...

References

External links

Categories: NPOV disputes | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Food politics | Humanitarian aid | Security | Urban agriculture The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (or Wilson Center) (located in Washington, D.C.) is a United States Presidential Memorial that was established as part of the Smithsonian Institution by act of Congress in 1968. ... The National Union of Popular Forces (French language, Union Nationale des Forces Populaires, UNFP) was founded in 1959 in Morocco by Mehdi Ben Barka and his entourage, because they found that the Istiqlal Party - which had led the independence struggle - wasnt radical enough. ... Africare is a non-profit organization specialized in development aid for Africa. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Sustainability is an attempt to provide the best outcomes for the human and natural environments both now and into the indefinite future. ... It has been suggested that Green design be merged into this article or section. ... Sustainable architecture is building design that takes into account all aspects of the building that will affect and be affected by the environment. ... Sustainable landscape architecture is a category of sustainable design concerned with the planning and design of outdoor space. ... Environmental design is the process of addressing environmental parameters when devising plans, programs, policies, buildings, or products. ... Ecological economics is an approach to rather than a branch of economics that addresses the interdependence and co-evolution between human economies and natural ecosystems. ... Development economics is a branch of economics that deals with the study of macroeconomic causes of long term economic growth, and microeconomics; the incentive issues of individual households and firms, especially in developing countries. ... Green economics is an approach to economics in which the economy is considered to be a component of, and dependent upon, the natural world within which it resides and of which is it considered a part. ... Green Gross Domestic Product (Green GDP) is an index of economic growth with the environmental consequences of that growth factored in. ... The triple bottom line captures an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring organizational (and societal) success - economic, environmental and social. ... Sustainable agriculture integrates three main goals: environmental stewardship, farm profitability, and prosperous farming communities. ... Forest gardening (also known as 3-Dimensional Gardening) is a food production and land management system based on replicating woodland ecosystems, substituting trees (such as fruit or nut trees), bushes, shrubs, herbs and vegetables which have yields directly useful to mankind. ... Humanure is a neologism designating human waste (feces and urine) that is recycled via composting for agricultural or other purposes. ... This is a list of companion plant relationships. ... This is a list of repellent plants. ... Ancient technique re-introduced by Masanobu Fukuoka. ... Vermicompost (also called worm compost, vermicast, worm castings, worm humus or worm manure) is the end-product of the breakdown of organic matter by some species of earthworm. ... The earliest mention of the phrase sustainable industries appeared in 1990 in a story about a Japanese group reforesting a tropical forest to help create sustainable industries for the local populace. ... Parkland in Burkina Faso: Sorghum grown under Faidherbia albida and Borassus akeassii near Banfora, Burkina Faso Agroforestry combines agriculture and forestry technologies to create more integrated, diverse, productive, profitable, healthy and sustainable land-use systems. ... Ecoforestry is forestry that emphasizes holistic practices which strive to protect and restore ecosystems1 instead of traditional forestry that maximizes economic productivity. ... Timber Exploitation of natural resources is an essential condition of the human existence. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Natural building. ... Green chemistry is a chemical philosophy encouraging the design of products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances. ... Green Computing is the design of technological and computing products that reduce the use of hazardous substances and radiation. ... Natural building involves a range of building systems and materials that place major emphasis on sustainability. ... This article is about a concept related to renewable energy, of which sustainable energy is a superset. ... Sustainable forest management (SFM) is the management of forests according to the principles of sustainable development. ... Sustainable procurement is a spending and investment process typically associated with public policy, although it is equally applicable to the private sector. ... Girl on a bicycle in a car free area in Frankfurt Sustainable transport is a phrase which was coined in the late 20th century to describe all forms of transport which minimise emissions of carbon dioxide and pollutants. ... The living machine at Oberlin College with a settlement tank in the foreground and filtering tanks in the background The concept of living machines represents a particularly interesting variant on intelligent machines, and has mostly been associated with water treatment systems that make use of natural bioremediation processes such as... Mycoremediation is a form of bioremediation, the process of using microbes to return an environment (usually soil) contaminated by pollutants to a less contaminated state. ... Appropriate technology is technology that is appropriate to the environmental, cultural and economic situation it is intended for. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Off-the-grid. ... Cob building dated 1539 in Devon, England. ... Composting toilets use biological processes to deal with the disposal and processing of human excrement into organic compost material. ... The albedo of several types of roofs Cool roofs are an effective alternative to bulk attic insulation under roofs in humid tropical and subtropical climates. ... Earth covered farm houses in Keldur, Iceland. ... Re-creation of Viking houses in Labrador Several grass roofs can be seen in the village of BÃ¸ur in the Faroe Islands. ... Rammed Earth is an old building material that has seen a revival in recent years as people seek low-impact building materials and natural building methods. ... Sheet composting is the process of composting organic matter directly onto the soil as a mulch and letting it decay there, rather than in a heap. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Solar Tower. ... Straw-bale construction is a building method that uses straw bales as structural elements, insulation, or both. ... A windcatcher (Badgir; Ø¨Ø§Ø¯Ú¯ÛŒØ±) is a traditional Persian architectural device used for many centuries to create natural ventilation in buildings. ... Green Map of Cambridge, Massachusetts Green Maps are environmentally themed maps which are usually created as a grassroots effort with a symbol set licensed from the non-profit Green Map System. ... Autonomy is the condition of something that does not depend on anything else. ... Sustainable development has also been defined as the process of balancing the need of humans for economic and social development with the need to protect the natural and built environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but in the indefinite future. ... Sustainable living might best be defined as a lifestyle that could, hypothetically, be sustained unmodified for many generations without exhausting any natural resources. ... The Natural Step is a systematic definition of sustainability developed by Swedish scientist, Karl-Henrik RobÃ¨rt. ... Permaculture Mandala summarising the ethics and principles of permaculture design. ... Similar or related terms: Near zero energy building, Zero energy house, Near zero energy house A zero energy building (ZEB) can be described as structure with a net energy consumption of zero over a typical year. ... Zoning in Permaculture design refers to a method of ensuring that elements are correctly placed. ... Image File history File links Crystal_128_energy. ... In physics and engineering, energy conversion is any process of converting energy from one form to another. ... // Energy development is the ongoing effort to provide sustainable, accessible energy resources through knowledge, skills, and constructions. ... This article is about a concept related to renewable energy, of which sustainable energy is a superset. ... For the physical concepts, see conservation of energy and energy efficiency. ...

Contents

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