Food Insecurity

The state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. During the first decade of this century, more than 800 million people live every day with hunger or food insecurity as their constant companion (see also National Academy of Science definitions).


Greenhouse Gas Effect

Heat trapping effect of greenhouse gases in the troposphere (lowest portion of the earth's atmosphere)


Life Cycle Assessment

LCA addresses the environmental aspects and potential environmental impacts (e.g. use of resources and the environmental consequences of releases) throughout a product's life cycle from raw material acquisition through production, use, end-of-life treatment, recycling and final disposal (i.e. cradle-to-grave). There are four phases in an LCA study: a) the goal and scope definition phase, b) the inventory analysis phase, c) the impact assessment phase, and d) the interpretation phase (ISO 2006).


Payment for Environmental Services (PES)

Payments to farmers or landowners who have agreed to take certain actions to manage their land or watersheds to provide an ecological service. As the payments provide incentives to land owners and managers, PES is a market-based mechanism, similar to subsidies and taxes, to encourage the conservation of natural resources.


Sustainable Intensification

Narrowly defined, SI refers to increase food production from existing farmland in ways that place far less pressure on the environment and that do not undermine our capacity to continue producing food in the future. However, Garnett et al. (2013) added the following four premises underlying SI: (a) The need to increase production; (b) Increase production must be met through higher yields because increasing the area of land in agriculture carries major environmental costs; (c) Food security requires as much attention to increasing environmental sustainability as to raising productivity; and (d) SI denotes a goal but does not specify a priori how it should be attained or which agricultural techniques to deploy.


Unit of Mass in Metric System

1,000,000,000,000,000  1x1015 petagram (Pg) quadrillion  
1,000,000,000,000  (Million Metric Tons or Megatonnes)1x1012 teragram (Tg) trillion
 1,000,000,000  (Thousand Metric Tons) 1x109 gigagram (Gg) billion
 1,000,000  (Metric Ton) 1x106 megagram (Mg) million
 1,000   1x103 kilogram (Kg) thousand  
 100   1x102 hectogram (Hg) hundred  
 10   1x101 decagram (Dg) ten  
 1    gram    
   0.1 10-1 decigram (dg) tenth   
   0.01 10-2 centigram (cg) hundredth  
   0.001 10-3 milligram (mg) thousandth  
   0.000,001 10-6 microgram (ยตg) millionth  
   0.000,000,001 10-9 nanogram (ng) billionth  
   0.000,000,000,001 10-12 picogram (pg) trillionth  
   0.000,000,000,000,001 10-15 femtogram (fp) quadrillionth