Green Economy in a Blue World-Full Report

4 Conclusions and recommendations

A wide range of both proven and emerging nutrient reduction policy, regulatory and economic instruments need to be applied and scaled up at local, national, regional and global levels to transform the nutrient economy from a linear to much more cyclic approach over an appropriate time frame. Policymakers need to send clear regulatory and market signals to agricultural, waste-water-management and fertilizer industries of the urgent need to transition towards optimal fertilizer use-efficiency and sizeable recovery and reuse of nutrients. These actions would create the enabling conditions to catalyze innovation in fertilizer management and use-efficiency and human and livestock waste nutrient recovery technologies and strategies, creating new business partnerships between the agriculture, waste water and fertilizer industries as well as associated jobs. Gradual improvements in efficiency of fertilizer use and reduced losses from farms, including reductions in releases of associated greenhouse gases would be a key outcome of the recommended actions. Further, an increase in the volume and proportion of fertilizer produced from recovered nitrogen (and phosphorus) and the diversification of sources for fertilizer rawmaterials would help to moderate fertilizer prices and their volatility, enhancing global food security. Market and regulatory mechanisms would catalyze the creation and dissemination of new nutrient recovery technologies and supply chains, creating sizeable numbers of new businesses and jobs. By incentivizing nutrient recovery and reuse and creation of associated business opportunities, these mechanisms could help mobilize substantial new sources of financing and innovative approaches for accelerating urgently needed progress on the sanitation MDG in the developing world. Over time, decreases in the loads of reactive nitrogen(andphosphorus)enteringcoastalareas will ultimately reduce coastal eutrophicationand hypoxia and associated impacts on ecosystems, economics and livelihoods.

in a Blue World

Humankind has arguably disturbed the global cycle of nitrogen as much as it has that of carbon, with cumulative addition of over 2 billion tonnes of new reactive nitrogen to the Earth’s biosphere over the last 50 years, primarily via the energy-intensive production of fertilizer using the Haber-Bosch process. As a result, reactive nitrogen loads to the oceans are now three times pre-industrial levels and projected to triple again by 2050 in the business as usual scenario. This has led to an exponential increase in the occurrence of coastal eutrophication, and hypoxic areas now exceed 500, with associated socio-economic losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars globally. Studies suggest an upper limit of 35 million tonnes N per year should be extracted from the atmosphere into reactive nitrogen, which would ultimately require an approximate 75 per cent reduction in the production of reactive nitrogen to return to ecologically acceptable limits. At present, most of humanity – particularly in the industrialized world but increasingly in fast developing middle income countries – practices a primarily linear approach to managing nutrients. The urgency of continued coastal eutrophication and its impacts – particularly hypoxia – on marine ecosystems and societies, underscores the need to begin a transition to much more cyclic management of nutrients whereby efficiency of fertilizer use is increased andanincreasingfractionofhumanandlivestock waste nutrients are recovered and reused for fertilizer. In parallel, some analyses project that economically recoverable global phosphorus reserves could peak and begin to decline as early as this century with unprecedented effects on global food security; whether it is this soon or somewhat longer does not negate the fact that eventually, phosphorus recovery from the waste stream needs to become the norm, not the exception, if long-term global food security is to be ensured.

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