 Hello, RA, it's 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time here in New York, and hello, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today, we're very pleased to bring you the latest in our 2016 webinar series, specifically on the subject of Managing Water for Food Security. My name is Yon Aurenda, and I'll be the moderator for today's webinar. When I'm not doing this, I work with the Engineering for Change as the director of our program. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit more about today's webinar. Today, nearly a billion people worldwide lack access to enough nutritious food to eat healthy and active lives. These food insecure people are also often lacking enough readily available water to meet their needs. Ensuring sustainable global food and water security is an urgent challenge, especially as populations and incomes continue to increase, climate changes, and demand for water resources continues to grow. So, we invited Roberto Lenton, the founding executive director of the Water for Food Institute at the University of Nebraska, to share his insights on the water food nexus and introduce some practical ways to improve water use and management and agricultural and food systems. And we'd like to welcome you, Roberto, and thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to give a shout out to the E4C webinar series team. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make recommendations for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact the team via the email address visible on the slide, webinarsatengineeringforchange.org. Before we move on to our presenter, I'd like to tell you a bit about engineering for change and who we are. 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So now it is my great pleasure to introduce to you our today's presenter, Roberta Luntin, is the founding executive director and the Robert Darry chair of the Water for Food Institute at the University of Nebraska. He's also a professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He's a specialist in water resources and sustainable development who is some four years of international experience in the field. Professor Luntin earned a civil engineering degree from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD from MIT. He's the holder of an honorary LZ from the University of Dundee before joining the University of Nebraska, Professor Luntin, with the chair of the inspection panel of the World Bank. We're very honored to have you here, Professor Luntin, and I'm going to turn it over to you. Well, thank you very much, Iana. That's a very nice introduction and welcome to everybody who is joining the webinar from all across the world. I was really excited to see so many people involved in so many different parts of this globe. So it's really an honor and a privilege for me to be able to share some thoughts with you over the next half an hour or so. I guess my overall talk is about the subject of managing water for food security. That's the focus of our institute and I want to sort of carry you through some of the main issues that relate to managing water for food security. I want to start with some overall context. Then say in a few words what I think are the main challenges of managing water for food security and then go over to the issue of practical solutions with a special reference to four topics about closing agricultural and water productivity gaps, about groundwater management, about irrigated agriculture and about drought management that relate to this challenge and then right at the end I want to have just a few minutes to talk about the Water for Food Institute itself. So that's what I have in mind and just starting with the overall context just to remind you of some overall statistics. I'm sure that you're familiar with most or if not all of these statistics but it's good to remind ourselves that we live in a world in which more than a billion people live in extreme poverty and what I mean by that is less than $1.25 a day. It's a world in which almost a billion people, 870 million people don't have enough food to eat. It's a world in which over one billion people lack access to clean drinking water and over 2.5 billion lack basic sanitation and it's a world in which partly as a result of all of that 165 million children under five are stunted as a result of chronic malnutrition. So it's a world where there are really serious problems of food security, of water security in the context of very poor and vulnerable populations. If we now look at another side of the picture it's another statistic that you're all familiar with is global population growth and the expectation that by the year 2050 we're going to have close to 9 billion people on this planet and you're also familiar with the fact that most of that growth is going to be taking place in the developing world in particular in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, 49% in sub-Saharan Africa, 41% in Asia. So it's a world that is growing in population rapidly but it's also a world where there is significant good news which is that the progress that we've made in terms of reducing poverty over the last 25 years has really been dramatic and even people are talking about the end of poverty as illustrated by this cover story in The Economist. So it's clearly a world where we have made significant progress where poverty levels as defined, where absolute poverty levels as defined by the $1.25 figure a day has decreased significantly and the impact that that has of course is that with rising incomes people are able to allocate more of their incomes to food for their families and that's going to result in better diets, more caloric intake and that has increasing pressure in terms of food supplies. So the good news actually translates into additional challenges as regards food supplies. And behind all of this or better said accompanying all of these changes is of course climate change and although many times the concept of climate change is depicted by the melting of the Arctic and things illustrated by this polar bear one thing to keep in mind is that much of climate change is actually felt through changes in the water regime, changes in the hydrological cycle, more extremes of floods and droughts and even rising sea levels has an impact on freshwater because of the fact that it leads to salinity intrusion in coastal areas. So much of the impacts of climate change felt through changes in the hydrological water cycle and so it has a particular significance when we're talking about water and food security. So let's from that overall context let's move in more specifically into the particular challenges of managing water for food security and I like starting out by describing it in terms of how can one attain global food security that is sustainable but obtain it in the face of increasing competition for scarce water resources. So the two issues of water security and food security are interconnected in this way and I like to think of it and I think this is something important to emphasise that it's not simply a technical issue of growing more food but it has all kinds of political, environmental, social and economic repercussions and that's what makes it so challenging but also what makes it so interesting. So maybe the best way to start out is to think what do we mean by the concept of water security and by the concept of food security and for water security I like thinking of it in terms of this definition that was developed by David Gray and Claudia Sadoff some years back and they defined it in terms of the reliable availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production coupled with an acceptable level of water related risks and these figures here illustrated on the left hand side clearly water essentially for productive purposes for livelihood generations as illustrated by that irrigated farm, on the right hand side water for food water for health as illustrated by the water that we need to consume daily for drinking and for other domestic purposes and in the middle reminding ourselves that water security is not simply a question of accessing water but also dealing with water related risks and that's primarily flooding where so what we have to think about in terms of water security is not only accessing water for productive or purposes or for meeting human needs but also addressing water related risks and as the last thing I would say about this definition is that it emphasizes not only quantity of water but the appropriate quality so whenever we're talking about water we have to think of those two dimensions now turning to food security I like the definition the simple definition of food security as simply being when everyone everywhere has access to enough safe and nutritious food for healthy and active life and I think there's general recognition that food security rests on three pillars one is the availability of food you can't have food security if food is not available but it also means access to food principally economic access to food so even if food is available if people don't have the income to be able to access that food there will be no food security and the third is the use of food how food is treated so that it is actually safe and nutritious which is an important part of the definition and one thing that I would emphasize here is that water is important in all of these three pillars water is important not only in the food production process in ensuring availability on the left-hand side so we not only need to have water in order to be able to grow food but we also need to recognize the role of water in overall economic development and in the generation of livelihoods that enables food access so water has an important role in the second pillar and on the third it's really important if you're going to be able to produce if in the household there is to be safe and nutritious food it's very important that there be clean water that can be used for cooking and that the drinking water that people use is safe so that you don't have a situation of diarrheal diseases that then negate that produce loss of calories and negate the positive impacts of nutritious food so water is important for all three pillars of food security in terms of the actual production of food I like to think of the overall challenge as advancing food security with less pressure on scarce water resources and one can see the challenges that that entails by looking at what is happening both in the food area and in the water area and this slide here tries to depict green on the left and blue on the right what are the trends that we see and on both sides we see trends going in opposite directions in worrying directions on the food side we see increasing global consumption primarily as a result not only of population growth but rising incomes and changing diets as I was explaining earlier we do see constraints in terms of expansion in cropland we also see changes in land use not only land degradation but also the use of land for non-food crops in particular biofuels we see in many parts of the world that yield increases that have been quite steady over the years are reaching a plateau and then finally we're seeing the impacts of climate change that affect just the ability to be able to produce crops in certain parts of the world so that's on the left hand side on the food front on the water front we see also very worrying signs in terms primarily of increasing competition by other water users people and industry and these other water users are increasing at much more than a linear scale we're seeing many parts of the world where even right now environmental water needs are not met we see decreasing quality as well as quantity principally as a result of pollution and not only in rural areas but also in urban areas but also in rural areas as a result of agricultural intensification we do see soil erosion and deteriorating soil health and when we have unhealthy soils that leads to poorer water management we see groundwater depletion in many parts of the world and I'll come back to that later on and again as with food we see the big impacts of climate change emphasizing the point I made earlier that the changes in climate are experienced through changes in the water regime so now let me turn to the practical solutions what can we do about this sometimes when one outlines the challenges of the salt what can we be done it's so complicated so difficult to tackle and one way to start is to describe the problem primarily as one of doing more with less we have to be able to figure out ways in which we can produce more food with less pressure on water resources and I use the term less pressure on water resources because I want to emphasize it's not only using less water but it's having less of an adverse impact on water quality so the overall challenge is one of doing more with less and the solutions there relate always to how can you figure out innovations that improve water productivity water productivity is the ratio between what is produced from the amount of food that is produced and the water that is consumed so we want to figure out ways to develop technological and other innovations to improve water productivity these four pictures depict the kinds of innovations that one can think of on the top left hand side there's certainly innovations in agricultural technology that can improve water productivity and just as an example a drought tolerant crops on the right hand side there's the innovations in irrigation technology that we're all familiar with be it centipivot irrigation as in this figure here or in drip irrigation or other ways in which one can make sure that one maximizes the productivity from the water that is applied on the lower left hand side is a soil moisture sensor as an example of the kinds of technologies of information technologies that can really improve water productivity and this is perhaps the area where the fastest growth in recent years the ability that we now have to be able to use information technology to improve productivity and a lot of it has to do to be able to measure how much water there is in the soil so that any additional water that we might apply is minimized and on the bottom right hand corner I wanted to emphasize that this also the concept of improving water productivity should be looked at across the whole food chain so not only at the farm end but all the way from farm to fork and there are innovations that can be made in food processing and beverage in the food and beverage industry and other industries in terms of using less water so that's clearly an important way of moving forward is looking at ways in which we can improve water productivity but I'd like to emphasize that it can't only be in terms of producing more food with less water as many people have emphasized reducing food waste needs to be a part of the solution because the less food we waste intrinsically that means the less water we waste every time we waste food we're also wasting the water that went into producing it so reducing food waste needs to be a part of the solution but I'd like to emphasize that this isn't necessarily low-hanging fruit it's not a panacea as this PowerPoint illustrates the causes differ from region to region it's much closer to the consumer and in places of the world like Europe and North America and industrialized Asia there's much more waste closer to the consumer than the production end but in other parts of the world in sub-Saharan Africa in South and Southeast Asia in Latin America a lot of it is or the food that is wasted from production to retailing and in both cases this presents challenges when it's close to the consumer it really implies huge challenges in terms of behavior change when it's closer to the production end it requires investments significant investments in reducing food waste at that end which again is not easy so it has to be part of the solution but it can't be the only part of the solution and the other thing I would emphasize is that international trade clearly plays a role water specialists like to talk about virtual water which is the water that is embedded in food that is exported or imported and there is quite a lot of important export or an export of virtual water that is happening right now so clearly international trade where food is produced in countries where abundant water and exported to countries where scarce water seems to make sense but we should all recognize that international trade is governed by all kinds of other factors and it's hard to isolate the water dimension from the other important drivers or the most important drivers of international trade in food products so let me now go into those areas that I mentioned earlier that I wanted to spend a bit of time looking at and the first has to do with closing agricultural and water productivity gaps the concept of yield gaps is fairly easy to explain we have for every plot of land anywhere in the world and for any given crop there is clearly a yield potential that is governed by agronomic factors and climatic factors and so on in addition from a practical point of view it's virtually impossible for one to always get that full potential so maybe there's a 75 to 85% of the yield potential is actually the attainable yield and then there's the actual average farm yield which is what farmers are producing today on average in that particular area in relation to the yield that is attainable and the yield gap the exploitable yield gap is the difference between that average farm yield and the attainable yield and in most parts of the world there is a yield gap that is exploitable but the amount and the size of that yield gap varies considerably and here's just an example of a yield gap in Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia a mapping of what those yield gaps are and I'll come back to this later on again but it illustrates that there are big differences between different parts of even these three countries in some areas a very large yield gap in the case of maize up to 6 tons per hectare in other areas a fairly small yield gap but in the end that's part of what we have to do is to reduce that yield gap to the extent that we possibly can taking into account that there is not that much potential for expanding cultivated area now the same can be said in terms of water productivity gaps and we have here at the University of Nebraska an agricultural water management network where farmers are working with researchers and extension technologies to develop extension agents to develop technologies that can be used on the field that will actually reduce water withdrawals and by reducing water withdrawal you improve the water productivity at the field level and this has been a very exciting activity growing number of farmers joining in this effort that actually reduces their costs at the same time as improving water productivity but one thing I would want to emphasize is that it's all very tricky because one has to be very careful about in assessing the results of these kinds of experiments clearly there is a yield impact these improved technologies and as I said earlier there is a water impact that is the reduction in water withdrawals but a reduction in water withdrawals at the farm level doesn't necessarily translate into net water savings at the watershed level so one has to be very careful about that because very often you are tempted when you say you can improve irrigation efficiency significantly and that sounds as though one can get big improvements in terms of net water savings but some of the water that is being saved would have returned to the aquifer anyway and so that the amount that is saved at the aquifer level at the watershed level is significantly lower than what would appear to be because of the reductions in water withdrawals at the farm level so these issues of water productivity are complex and have to be looked at carefully the next issue I want you to touch on is on sustainable groundwater management because that is a challenge in many parts of the world here is an example from the World Resources Institute of India's groundwater and tables and how they are decreasing 54% of wells are decreasing in terms of the depth to groundwater and as you can see from this graph the situation is the most serious in the northwest but other parts of the country are also facing particularly and towards the south are also facing significant levels of groundwater decrease and it is a global phenomenon around the world that you that there is very very little good news in most parts of the world you see groundwater decreasing and here is an example from the United States of the High Plains aquifer in the most and in the heartland of the country high productivity areas you see that aquifer also facing significant reductions in decreases in the water table over the last several decades particularly the further south you go now I said earlier that there is almost no good news but there is one piece of good news which is northern part of the aquifer that has faced relatively small amounts of groundwater decrease and I'm giving that as an example because the reason why this is the case let me see if I can change the slide is in my view partly the result of good groundwater recharge in the state of Nebraska and so there is just the good fortune of being able to recharge the aquifer naturally but as important a factor is good groundwater governance and I'd like to emphasize that because when you're talking about groundwater sustainability in the end it boils down to governance and in the case of Nebraska the difference was made by a far reaching decision over 40 years ago to establish natural resource districts that have local control over groundwater management so these are local authorities local elected bodies that control water at a very local level and have had in my view a hugely important role in terms of groundwater governance and in protecting the aquifer and that's the good news in that generally very depressing story of groundwater sustainability across the globe one aspect of all this and that's why it's so important to talk about local authorities is that in the end farmers have a hugely important role in managing water it's clearly they are the ones who directly manage 70% of the world's water so you can't think of managing water only in terms of water agencies and government bureaucracies and so on in the end it's farmers and local authorities where farmers have a really important role have to be an important part of the solution let me move on to drought management a really critical subject across the globe over the last year we've been all heard about the droughts in southern Brazil the droughts in California increasingly there's always some spot around the world that is in the middle of a drought and so it's a really important issue but one aspect of dealing with drought is the ability to be able to monitor drought and we do have here in the at our university the National Monetary Centre that essentially releases every week a picture of drought emerging in different parts of the country and so that's a source of really important information that can be used by decision makers to be able to develop appropriate responses this particular map was produced in the middle of a the most serious recent drought which was in 2012 and these kinds of tools are more and more available around the world so clearly the ability to be able to monitor drought and get the up-to-date information is really significant the other side of it is water management because in the end the ability to whether a drought has to do with how water is managed and particularly storage because in the end that it is storage that enables us to deal with temporary scarcity it allows us to capture the resource when it is abundant and use it when it is scarce and I like to think of storage not only in terms of physical storage but also virtual storage and when I say virtual water storage I'm thinking for example virtual storage because you're storing what is produced by water so when we're talking about storage and the ability to cope let's think of it in this broader sense and one way of looking at at this just expanding what I just said it's clearly one should look at the different kinds of water storage, reservoirs, groundwater soil moisture, look at food storage the virtual water storage that I was talking about earlier but I would also include in that management strategies drought or flood insurance water sharing agreements those in a broader sort of virtual sense also allow us to cope with extremes and so a drought management energy has to encompass these various different elements and the last thing I would say on this topic is that when one is thinking of water storage really important not only to think about the built storage but also the natural storage and in many parts of the world the natural storage is as important as the built storage so the built storage would include reservoirs for example but the natural storage often includes ponds and tanks it includes of course aquifers it includes soil moisture includes natural wetlands all these are essentially what nature provides us for free so in thinking about drought management we should think about the reservoirs that can be built but also we should be looking at what nature allows us provides for us essentially for free if we govern it properly let me move on to the what I think was the last of the topics that I had singled out for special attention and that is irrigation and it's a really a changing context and irrigation is probably the most obvious example of managing a lot of food security and it's a changing context because if you look at this chart that was developed with World Bank and FAO data you can see that there were a couple of decades from between 1970 and 1990 particularly between the early 70s and the late 80s which were the heyday of irrigation development and irrigation was being expanded all over the world but that pace of irrigation development has slowed down considerably this diagram only goes up to 2005 but the picture hasn't changed very much in terms of overall irrigation development so it's a changing world and the one area where perhaps one would be looking for in the future for potential expansion is in sub-Saharan Africa if you look at it in sub-Saharan Africa less than 5% of cultivated land is irrigated as opposed to 20% in Asia and I believe it's around 10% in Latin America so it's really lagging and many people argue that you can't really have a green revolution in Africa without the same kind of investments in irrigation so here's a continent where there are if you take out if you just look at sub-Saharan Africa as a whole water resources are relatively abundant and yet there's very small amounts of irrigated agriculture so there's any part of the world where there is potential it's in sub-Saharan Africa and to a lesser extent in Latin America where you have a similar situation of relatively abundant water resources and relatively low levels of irrigation investments so far so that's one dimension of the change the other dimension of the change is that because of the costs of irrigated agriculture and irrigation we're going to see much more the use of irrigation in terms of higher value crops, more profitability much more emphasis on the high value crops and in keeping with what I was saying much more emphasis on reducing water use in getting more crop drops so that's going to be a large part of what we will be seeing in the future so I promised earlier to end with some quick description of what our institute does because we are in the middle of this challenge of managing water for food security we were established in 2010 with a gift from the Robert B. Dowdy Charitable Foundation and our vision is a food and water secure world in which global food security is ensured but without compromising the use of water to meet other pressing needs so that's the overall business that we're in and what drives our work and we have identified over the last few years five areas where we feel we can make a difference and these are areas that are relevant both to the developing world and it's also relevant to areas of high productivity in countries like United States or Canada or Australia or Argentina or Brazil so both the food exporting countries as well as the more vulnerable developing countries and the five areas are closing agricultural productivity gaps groundwater management for agricultural production enhancing high productivity irrigated agriculture agroecosystems and public health and the management of agricultural drought which we do together with the National Drought Mitigation Centre as I was mentioning earlier just some examples of the work that we're engaged in here we are involved in a pilot project together with a private company Valmont Irrigation and an NGO World Vision and the idea there is how can the benefits of centre pivot irrigation that have mainly been used for large scale commercial agriculture in Africa how can those be brought to benefit small holders so we're working at ways in which of social organization so that the huge benefits in terms of increased productivity and increased incomes can be brought to bear to with small holders so that's one example of the kind of collaborative public private partnership that we're involved in another example is the global yield gap in water productivity atlas and I was mentioning earlier that map that was produced in Tanzania Ethiopia and Kenya that was produced by this global yield gap in water productivity atlas which is a collaboration between the group of faculty here at the University of Nebraska as well as in Wageningen University in the Netherlands supported by the Gates Foundation education is very much a part of our mandate we have a dual degree program with the Institute of Water Education in the Netherlands and students study for one year in the Netherlands and a second year here in Nebraska and end up with degrees from both places and we also have an active program of internships and fellowships for both undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs and then finally we do have an annual Water for Food Global Conference because we feel very strongly that in the end one has to have engage with stakeholders through policy dialogues based on solid research and so we do have an annual conference that really brings together stakeholders a number of countries around the world and not only academics but practitioners, producers government agencies policymakers so it's a very exciting annual event that we that we organize so that's all I wanted to say this is just a small little advertisement for our next conference which is on April 24 to 26 and it's going to focus on what we call catalytic collaborations of building public-private partnerships for water and food security so that's the the main things I wanted to share with you and again thanks for your attention and I'd be happy to spend some time in addressing any questions that you might have. Thank you Roberto that was an incredibly rich presentation with so much insight and we're super excited to hear some questions from our attendees there's been some chatter already happening amongst them they seem to be commenting to one another so I'd like to invite those with questions to submit them via the Q&A window and we have some coming in so the first question we have and it's actually one that I was also thinking is I know you've presented quite a few approaches but could you speak to a couple specific examples or what are some of the promising innovations that you've seen in technology that improves water productivity? Yeah I guess some some of the most promising are in fact not necessarily rocket science some of the most promising innovations I think are the result of low cost technologies then led to significant rates of adoption and that really is an important to take into account the bamboo tube well in South Asia in the 70s and 80s huge impact because it was low cost and enabled a large and significant adoption and I think the use of low lift pumps in sub-Saharan Africa has also had a hugely significant adoption rate chatting to a colleague recently with a group called Kickstart they have sold something like 250,000 low lift pumps across sub-Saharan Africa and you can just see that the impact something like that could have so I think the general category of low lift low lift well I wouldn't say low lift but low cost irrigation technologies I think is really significant at the other end of the spectrum I would say that the real revolution in terms of precision agriculture and data intensive approaches that allow farmers to be able to tailor the amount of water to the specific requirements at a very of the crop at a very localised level so that you can take into account minute variations in terrain and so on so that the amount of water applied responds to the requirement of the crop taking into account soil moisture and so on again has huge implications and it's essentially science based farming and we were chatting yesterday with a group of farmers here from Nebraska that have adopted these kinds of techniques and it essentially means that rather than simply apply water when the crop looks as though it needs it it means applying water based on a scientific understanding of how much the crop actually needs and it can result in absolutely in huge reductions in the amount of water that is applied so I think those are some examples at the two ends of the spectrum of innovations that are done in practice. Those are really some examples and you mentioned some of these low cost pumps and just like to let the audience know that we actually have cataloged a number of such low cost pumps within our Solutions Library for anybody who's looking for examples we have the kickstart that we featured amongst others so I really do appreciate you noting those. I think that low cost aspect is quite critical and we have a comment here from one of our attendees who notes that in addition to the current innovations where is the value benefit for farmers and talk about farmers having that 70% control of water where is the value benefit for farmers to adopt such technologies who may have limited investment budgets so if you could speak to that particular challenge. Yep, and that's where the policy environment is so important it very often the value benefit for farmers is the reduction in energy costs in most countries it's not a reduction in the water cost because that is not a significant element in many contexts but the value benefit can be a reduction in energy costs as well as whatever yield gains the technology produces so if you're going from a less efficient to a more efficient system of irrigation you can reduce your energy costs but again that depends very much on the policy environment and the system that is used in terms of payment for energy services. Absolutely and definitely we know there's quite a lot of chatter in the field regarding the water food energy nexus because it's one that's so inextricably linked. Another question that we have here is would manually or cattle operate machinery be viable? A viable alternative sorry just lost my question for powering up more efficient irrigation practices so manual or cattle operate machinery I'm not trying to have any thoughts on that? The thing to I guess I would say that the overall point is a value one that manually operated that when one thinks about different technologies and so on for improving the use of water you should also include manual approaches. The thing to keep in mind on the manual side is the energy balance and the amount of labor and energy and calories that go into that then offset the benefits that the technology might produce so whenever one talks about newly operated technologies you really have to look at the energy balance and the caloric I guess usage that entails. Yes indeed that's a very good point and I think we have one more question that is turning us to look at farming techniques and in this case the question is can you speak to the impact that conservation farming has had on food and water security and is there a method that is seen as making strides towards better security? Conservation farming Great well thank you very much that really is an important question and there's no doubt in my mind that conservation farming has a huge impact in terms of the use of water in agriculture because one of the objectives of conservation farming is to be able to conserve soil moisture to conserve whatever water is available that the crop can use so making sure that any water that falls is retained and can be used for crop production running off and into streams and elsewhere so it is a really important part of the equation and I think some of the data that we have is that it's one of the most effective ways of producing water use. It relates to a point that I was making earlier about healthy soils. The healthier the soil is the more it is able to retain water and the more it is able to retain water the more the crop can access that water for crop production purposes. Absolutely and I'm going to take one last question and I think it's still quite high to the topic of conservation farming the question is regarding storage of resources and banking for future use when in high demand storage of water the question is is there movement and progress in the political environment allowing such storage devices as rain catchments? What was the last part of the question is there movement? Sure so the question is about storage devices such as rain catchment systems where there is progress in the political sphere for really supporting those kinds of devices to be utilized in the farming setting rain catchment systems and other types of storage for water. Great question again because so much of the secret here is how to be able to capture water and avoid its runoff so that is clearly has to be a part of the equation and in terms of the movement on the political sphere I think that it varies I think too much of the discussion around storage tends to be around large infrastructure and not much attention to some of the more local systems to capture rainwater and so on so that the political debate is often dominated by the larger systems whereas in practice some of these other smaller systems that more local skills can have huge impacts. One really good example that I think of policies that work is in India where in Chennai there is essentially the incentives for building rainwater catchment systems have been built into if I understand it correctly into the housing codes so whenever you want if you want to have access to water from the mains you have to install a rainwater catchment system so that water that which essentially means that the rainwater then will recharge the aquifer so I think that you do have some important experiments and movement in the political arena towards these kinds of smaller systems to capture rain but much more is needed. That is really interesting and I think a good inspirational note for us to end on I couldn't agree more that solutions that are viable at the local scale really have tremendous potential part of the rationale for us Engineering for Change capturing all of these kinds of products and services is to encourage more ideas around those kinds of solutions and certainly policy has a tremendous role to play. We are at time and I would like to thank you Roberto for sharing with us all of these insightful ideas and giving us some food for thought if you will and I'd like to thank all of you out there for attending today's webinar for those of you who are seeking to receive your professional development hours please do reach out with a code that is listed on the slide in front of you. We apologize and get to everyone's questions. There's no questions that have come in but if you really have a burning question please feel free to email us at webinars at engineeringchange.org and we'd be happy to pass them on and don't forget to become an E4C member to get information on our upcoming webinars. Thank you everyone have a great morning evening or afternoon wherever you may be and we will catch you on the next E4C webinar. Take care.