Peak wheat is the concept that agricultural production, due to its high use of water and energy inputs, is subject to the same profile as oil and other fossil fuel production. The central tenet is that a point is reached, the "peak", beyond which agricultural production plateaus and does not grow any further, and may even go into permanent decline.
Based on current supply and demand factors for agricultural commodities (e.g., changing diets in the emerging economies, biofuels, declining acreage under irrigation, growing global population, stagnant agricultural productivity growth), some commentators are predicting a long-term annual production shortfall of around 2% which, based on the highly inelastic demand curve for food crops, could lead to sustained price increases in excess of 10% a year – sufficient to double crop prices in seven years.
According to the World Resources Institute, global per capita food production has been increasing substantially for the past several decades.
Water is a necessary input for food production. Two billion people face acute water shortage this century as Himalayan glaciers melt. Water shortages in China have helped lower the wheat harvest from its peak of 123 million tons in 1997 to below 100 million tons in recent years. But by 2020 production is back to 134Mt, see.
Of China's 617 cities, 300 are facing water shortages. In many, these shortfalls can be filled only by diverting water from agriculture. Farmers cannot compete economically with industry for water in China. China is developing a grain deficit even with the over-pumping of its aquifers. Grain production in China has been said to have peaked in 1998 at 392 million tons, falling below 350 million tons in 2000, 2001, and 2002, although such was 571 million tons in 2011 after eight consecutive years of increase from 2003 to 2011. The annual deficits have been filled by drawing down the country's extensive grain reserves, and by reliance on the world grain market. Some predict that China will soon become the world's largest importer of grain.
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Peak coal is the peak consumption or production of coal by a human community. Global coal consumption peaked in 2013, and had dropped slightly by the end of the 2010s. The peak of coal's share in the global energy mix was in 2008, when coal accounted for 30% of global energy production. The decline in coal use is largely driven by consumption declines in the United States and Europe, as well as developed economies in Asia. In 2019, production increases in countries such as China, Indonesia, India, Russia and Australia compensated for the falls in the United States and Europe.
vignette|Graphique montrant la production mondiale de phosphore, 1900-2016, rapporté par l’Institut d’études géologiques des États-Unis Le pic du phosphore est un concept qui décrit le moment où l'humanité atteint le taux de production mondial maximum de phosphore en tant que matière première industrielle et commerciale. Le terme est utilisé d'une manière équivalente au terme mieux connu de pic pétrolier.
Peak water is a concept that underlines the growing constraints on the availability, quality, and use of freshwater resources. Peak water was defined in 2010 by Peter Gleick and Meena Palaniappan. They distinguish between peak renewable, peak non-renewable, and peak ecological water to demonstrate the fact that although there is a vast amount of water on the planet, sustainably managed water is becoming scarce. Lester R.
Explore la conception de travaux d'ingénierie pour les inondations, en se concentrant sur la détermination des inondations sur 100 ans et l'effondrement des digues lors d'événements extrêmes.
The extraction, supply, market price and recycling of the metals used for superalloys were modelled using the systems dynamics model WORLD6. Peak production per capita (Supply Security) and stock-in-use per capita (Utility of Use) as well as resource stock ...
Paul Scherrer Institute, World Resources Forum2019
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Despite space heating and cooling, the energy use for hot water production has not changed significantly over time and accounts for a big share in modern, well-insulated buildings. The main challenge of hot water generation lies in the highly stochastic na ...
Electric vehicles’ market penetration has been rising due to new technological developments and awareness of the climate change threat. Instead of being a burden for today’s electricity production, such as increasing peak demands, they can also have a posi ...