Aspects of sustainable development

How smart agriculture can feed the world in 2050 

The phrase, “Please, sir, I want some more,” was uttered by Charles Dickens’ fictional character, Oliver Twist, in a London orphanage in 1837. At that time, there were approximately 1.2 billion people on the planet and many went hungry. Nearly 200 years later, even more people are asking the same question. The world’s population has reached 7.6 billion, but low-income families in cities of the developed world still go hungry, while drought and war cause famine for millions in developing countries. Given these problems, how will it be possible to feed the projected 10 billion people on the planet in 2050?

A recent report by the World Resources Institute stated that in order to feed a population of 10 billion in 2050 (see Figure 1), the following gaps would need to be addressed:

• A 56 percent food gap between crop calories produced in 2010 and those needed in 2050 under business-as-usual growth
• A 593-million-hectare land gap (an area nearly twice the size of India) between global agricultural land area in 2010 and expected agricultural expansion by 2050

Figure 1. Creating a sustainable food future by 2050

Source: World Resources Institute

What’s important to note is that the world already produces enough food to feed the current population, but over-production, over-consumption and supply chain issues lead to huge amounts of waste. The US Food and Drug Administration estimates that 30–40 percent of the US food supply is thrown away. Waste food is the single largest category of material placed in its landfills. The World Counts estimates that the 800 million people suffering from hunger and undernourishment could be fed by less than a quarter of the food lost or wasted in the US and Europe. A sobering thought. And it gets worse because every kilo of overproduction also represents wasted water, energy, and labor while, incredibly, forests and land continue to be cleared for industrialized livestock farming and crop planting.

It’s clear that production and consumption need managing, but equally, global supply chains are not delivering food and nutrients where they’re most needed. All these wasted resources adversely impact both the natural and human capital needed in sustainable economies and societies.

Technology is often seen as the answer to many modern-day problems, but in truth, it is only part of the solution and complementary to other actions. For example, by far the greatest amount of GHG emissions in this sector comes from methane, a gas generated by farm animals. Emissions will only reduce if demand for meat and dairy decreases. Moving people to a more plant-based diet requires a cultural change that could take a generation to achieve, even though Generation Z is already enthusiastically embracing this lifestyle. Science plans to deliver genetically modified (GM) crops to increase yield and make them resistant to pests and disease, so reducing the need for pesticides and fertilizers, but this too takes time as it requires government backing and is fraught with ethical issues.

 
In the meantime, technology can ensure best practices in existing (as well as future) agricultural production. Technologies such as digital connectivity—via public satellite and public or private LTE and 5G networks—digital Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, drones, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics can make agriculture more sustainable by minimizing the use of pesticides, fertilizer and water. These technologies can enable precision farming, and Bell Labs consulting predicts that if 25 percent of all farms adopted precision farming by 2030, it would lead to yield increases of up to 300 million tonnes per year, a reduction in farming costs of up to US$100 billion per year and a reduction of waste water by up to 150 billion cubic meters per year.

How can we make agriculture smart?

By deploying IoT sensors across a field and connecting to a private network or local mobile network—farms can monitor water and test nutrient levels in the soil. This ensures that expensive fertilizers and chemicals are only dispersed when necessary to boost yield. The IoT network can be used to monitor the performance of farm machinery and irrigation systems while drones can be sent out for routine visual checks.

In conjunction with Nokia, the Vodafone Foundation has launched Smart Agriculture-as-a-Service to improve the livelihood of 50,000 farmers across 10 districts in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra in India. More than 400 sensors have been deployed over 100,000 hectares of farmland to collect data for analysis by the solution’s cloud-based and localized smart agriculture app. Sensors include soil probes, weather stations, insect traps and crop cameras. Insights from the data will help farmers to improve soy and cotton crop yields, as well as reduce their impact on the environment.

P. Balaji, Chief Regulatory & Corporate Affairs Officer at Vodafone Idea Limited, said: “Smart crop management using Smart IoT and AI-based solutions is transforming the prevalent agricultural practices into more ‘intelligent’ ones, enabling farmers with smart decision making and helping them improve production and crop quality through better utilization of resources.”

Figure 2. Technology solutions for smart agriculture

Source: Nokia, WING IoT network grid

Can innovation move sustainable production closer to points of consumption?

It’s hard to understand why strawberries need to be in shops in January in the northern hemisphere; but consumer demand has led to global supply chains filling supermarket shelves with perishable, out of season products all year round. These supply chains are easily disrupted by fuel and labor shortages, trade disputes, and as we have seen, a global health crisis and of course climate change. Increasingly, consumer groups are drawing attention to food airmiles associated with produce and encouraging consumers to buy in-season fruit and vegetables and to shop locally to reduce the logistical costs and environmental impact of long journeys.

The global food supply is surprisingly fragile. According to the Food and Agriculture Administration of the United Nations (FAO), 75 percent of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and five animal species. Biodiversity rather than monoculture is an important consideration for future agricultural strategies and a resilient food supply chain.

The desire for food security with a resilient supply chain has given rise to farms in urban environments—for example, hydroponic warehouses and vertical farms. Hydroponic agriculture gives greater control over when and where food is produced as it doesn’t rely on the local climate or prevailing weather conditions and requires no soil.

 
Vertical faming takes the idea of high-density human habitation and uses the concept to cultivate, grow and harvest crops all year round. They are always sited close to the urban centers where they’ll be consumed. Take AeroFarms, which is located in New Jersey. It is working with Nokia Bell Labs on a proof of concept for an integrated system that tests technologies such as AI/ML, wireless networking and drone orchestration to monitor for abnormalities at the individual plant level. This system can image every plant every day.

David Rosenberg, CEO at AeroFarms notes, “This level of detailed imaging and insights helps us be better farmers by monitoring our plant biology dynamically and allowing us to course correct as needed to ensure the highest level of quality all year round.” The advantage of this approach is that as temperature, light, moisture and feed—in other words, the artificial climate—can be managed and optimized while the number of harvests per year are increased. The time between harvest, storage and distribution is also far shorter, meaning that produce arrives fresher and faster on the shelves while reducing the environmental impact of trucking and shipping produce long distances.

How to increase agricultural sustainability?

Small farming is the lifeblood of the planet. The GSMA reports that smallholders represent 500 million households who are responsible for producing food for ~70 percent of the world’s population. Yet while small-scale operations can be innovative and nimble, small farms are also the most vulnerable to changing climate patterns, which affect their yields and can impact supply chains. This is especially true in lower income countries, where farmers mainly need access to the internet to check weather reports, obtain the financial capital necessary to buy seeds and fertilizers, sell crops, and gain intelligence to improve their yield and business practices. In higher and in middle income countries, on the other hand, technology can supply far more sophisticated sensors, detailed imagery from drones, and fully automated machinery.

Today it still seems that there are too many Oliver Twists in the world and several factors still need to align to ensure the sustainable agricultural practices and food production necessary to feed our growing population. These include changing human behavior and consumption patterns, better management of food production and food waste, ensuring crop biodiversity, supporting farmers exposed to climate change and rethinking where farming occurs. Technology and innovation play a significant role in meeting these challenges, and in providing lower carbon and sustainable solutions for agriculture and food production. We can only hope, with all this in place, that by 2050 fewer people will need to ask for more.

Telecommunications has played a pivotal role in helping the world achieve unprecedented technological feats. The march towards ground-breaking innovation in connectivity, digitalization and automation will revolutionize almost all aspects of our lives. But along with it comes a profound responsibility. Ensuring that the critical services are provided with minimal fallout on a climate-stressed planet.  

The need for a robust communications infrastructure that can meet the extremely complex and varied expectations of subscribers has been rising steadily. It soared even higher since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which in turn has compelled telcos to consume more energy than ever. It’s not only emissions that should be a matter for concern. Usage of materials and waste are also major contributors to the industry’s carbon footprint.

Old is new  

Material use constitutes around 40 percent of global emissions and currently a mere 10 percent of materials are treated as circular. Reuse, recycle and refurbish should be the guiding principles for the future. In that respect optimum use of available resources, efficiency and digitalization are essential to inject circular practices when creating new products and services. In simple terms, circular economy promotes the concept of retaining the value of components, products and resources by extending their life cycle and optimizing waste management.  

Nokia adopted circular practices a quarter of a century ago while following the classic waste hierarchy model. The priority is to avoid generating waste through digitalization, operational efficiency and by extending the life of the product. Since it is always not possible to dematerialize everything, proper waste management procedures are equally important wherein we first explore avenues to reuse, followed by material recycling. The very last option is recovery and landfill. 

 “Collaboration with the supply chain to increase the use of recycled materials in the components they provide to us, tracking material origin and reporting practises development to understand the recycled content are some of the additional measures we take to adopt the principles of circularity,” she adds.  

Nokia has been accepting legacy products from customers for years, even if they were manufactured by a third party. On several occasions these are repaired and reused by customers, refurbished internally, or broken down for parts harvesting. In some instances, components are recycled for raw materials for a completely different application or sector. Such an approach reduces the need for raw material extraction and lowers emissions.

Circular economy in Nokia  

Nokia has made significant progress in adopting circular practices and intends to do more by setting clearly defined objectives.  

In 2020, Nokia processed 5,870 metric tons of obsolete products and parts. Out of these 79,400 items with a combined weight of 570 metric tons were reused. Approximately 5,250 metric tons of old equipment was dispatched for energy and materials recovery and 50 tons to landfill. The result, 99 percent of the material content in our products were fit for utilization.  

In the same year, Nokia put in motion a policy to improve the use of recycled materials in its products. To that effect, we worked in close coordination with cast aluminium parts suppliers to better understand the sourcing of raw materials and sought avenues to increase recycled content in components. A study later showed that 54 percent of the 23,200 metric tons of cast aluminium parts used in Nokia products had recycled materials in them. Challenges, however, remain pertaining to material purity.

“We are studying more materials in the supply chain but more needs to be done. We have to work across the industries to develop the tracking mechanism, set boundaries and definitions on what can be reported as recycled content,” says Tanskanen.

 Attempts have also been made to increase the circularity of plastics used in products. In 2020, again, Nokia tried to improve the recycling prospects of plastics through the reduced use of non-halogen free materials and investigated whether mix post-consumer recyclates could be mixed with virgin plastics to produce product housings. 

It’s noteworthy to mention here that Nokia saved 31,600 tons CO2 through circular practices in that year.

Setting the right standards  

As the industry mulls the best course of action to chart an effective circularity strategy, it is imperative that appropriate standards and frameworks are created which could help telecom companies to gauge their performance.  

Nokia has contributed actively by sharing best practices and creating telecommunication specific circular economy standards in the ITU-T  (International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication standardization sector) and the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute). We joined the JAC forum to contribute to the debate on circularity with telecom service provider customers and received a best practice in circular economy recognition.

Going green with circularity  

According to the World Resources Institute, more than 100 billion tons of resources enter the global economy every year, out of which a mere 8.6 percent gets recycled and reused. Such arbitrary exploitation is not sustainable and thus new ways of operating and partnering is the need of the hour if we were to realize the goal of a true circular economy.  

Telecommunications operators will play a key role on that front. For circularity to be a success, cooperation across the whole value chain is essential. The industry must set ambitious goals and track performance. Traditional business models will have to be revisited and the status quo challenged. At Nokia, we have been following well-established circular practices for decades that enable us to utilize the full value of our products.  

“We will be introducing a circularity target which will look at different areas of our business. From the office, R&D labs to product takeback and final assembly lines. Our goal is to develop material management to such an extent, so that by 2030 there will be no need for landfilling,” Tanskanen adds.    

Read more:  

Orange and Nokia develop the use of refurbished equipment in network infrastructures
 
Make do and mend – circularity comes full circle  

People & Planet 2020