Rural-Urban Linkages blog posts

Earth’s growing population is adding mountains of organic waste. Can businesses clean up and cash in?

At the end of 2016, we saw the highest accumulated number of forcibly displaced people since the Second World War, reaching an unprecedented level of 65.6 million people. As in 1945, the world is now on the move again. And the drivers remain conflict, political instability and poverty. Again, the results are hunger, loss of livelihoods and threats to human lives.

Sanitation services and waste collection have long been a financial burden for the public sector. A new series of business models shows how this trend cannot only be reversed, but how recycling and reusing waste can be a lucrative endeavor.

UN-Water has designated 2017 as the year of Wastewater and is releasing a report on World Water day, United Nations World Water Development Report 2017: Wastewater/The Untapped Resource. WLE/IWMI and FAO have co-authored a chapter on the risks and opportunities of using wastewater for agriculture.

How can we secure sufficient food and nutrition for growing cities? A recent study implies that relying on urban farming is not the only answer.

Wastewater recovery is a hot topic, but there's much more work to be done. This dispatch from SWWW identifies some of the strategies that can help mainstream wastewater recovery and make it a globally implemented and universally accepted practice.

It's cheaper to mine phosphorus than it is to recycle it: as a result there has been little incentive to reclaim phosphorus, despite its disastrous environmental effects. A new paper in Evironmental Science & Technology makes a new case for the recovery and reuse of phosphorus.

Ecomodernism embraces agricultural intensification as one of the primary means of decoupling humanity from the environment. However, ecomodernism relies on some problematic assumptions about the division between humanity and nature and the nature of human use of rural spaces.

Interest in investing in sustainability is on the rise. With 2016 set to be the year of green finance according to some, potential investors and stakeholders are congregating at GLF this year to discuss opportunities. Here are some development initiatives they can invest in.

What if sanitation and waste challenges in megacities across Asia and Africa could be turned into profitable business ventures?

For IWMI Director General, Jeremy Bird, the world's emerging water crisis in most places is one of management rather than of absolute water shortages -- of not making the most of clean water, and of profligate disregard for the value of waste water.