Why This Book?

Abstract

The Earth is facing huge challenges, in spite of great achievements in economy, finance, and medical innovations, which improve health and extend life. The current big challenge is a strong population growth compared to a much slower tendency in agricultural production increase. These phenomena have already strongly affected food security, since more than one billion people, nearly a sixth of the world’s population, are currently suffering from chronic hunger and malnutrition due to a lack of food. Future prospects are also challenging since feeding nine billion people, the number expected by 2050, would require world agricultural to produce nearly 70% more food, which is practically not feasible. In the efforts to produce more food agriculture has put considerable strain on the environment in overexploiting soil fertility, causing land degradation, diminishing fresh water, deteriorating ecosystems, which in turn are affecting climate. Besides these problems, a warmer climate itself is likely to constrict stronger agricultural production due to an expected increase in severity and frequency of large-scale weather extremes, especially drought. These global changes put additional strain on food security. This chapter explains the principles of this book, focusing on prediction of food security (FS) based on monitoring environmental factors, deteriorating FS, from operational satellites. A short description of remaining chapters is provided with a specific focus on the new satellite-based vegetation health (VH) method for high-resolution monitoring of environmental impacts on crops and pasture, drought detection and prediction and climate change contribution to food security. The material presented in the book is unique, since it is based on nearly four decades of the author’s experience in developing and applying satellite-based VH method for crop modeling in nearly 30 countries, global drought detection and monitoring (area, intensity, duration, etc.), climate change impacts consequences for land cover and vegetation, losses in agricultural production and food security prediction. In addition, the presented material is also based on experience of nearly 70,000 customers who are using VH-based products for monitoring earth surface and environmental impacts on crops.