Agriculture Sustainable Development Agriculture Sustainable Development Glossary

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).

Any of the atmospheric gases, both natural and anthropogenic, that contribute to the greenhouse effect by absorbing infrared radiation produced by solar warming of the Earth's surface. Water vapor (H₂O), carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (NO₂) and ozone (O₃) are the primary greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

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

Lack of proper nutrition, caused by not having enough to eat, not eating enough of the right things, or being unable to use the food that one does eat (see more on Wikipedia).

Stunted growth also known as stunting and nutritional stunting, is a reduced growth rate in human development, characterized by a low height for one's age. It is a primary manifestation of malnutrition (or more precisely undernutrition) and recurrent infections, such as diarrhea and helminthiasis, in early childhood and even before birth, due to malnutrition during fetal development brought on by a malnourished mother. An estimated 162 million children under 5 years of age, or 25%, were stunted in 2012 (Source: Wikipedia).

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.