Food has, for most of our species history, been intensely political: who gets to eat what, how often, and through what means? The scale of polity in question has shifted over time, from very local institutions dividing up grain piles to an international community imagined in the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. Simultaneously, the numbers and interests of people asserting political stakes in food and agriculture have likewise shifted up and out. Global networks advocate social justice in distal agrarian systems, promotion of some farming techniques and prohibition of others, food sovereignty or efficiencies of markets and trade. Political consumerism allows the well-endowed to "vote with their dollars" for changes in food systems far from home, but depends on certification and labeling from unseen institutions. As an object of governmentality, food has never been so prominent. The thirty-five handbook chapters confront four major themes in the politics of food: property, technology, justice and knowledge. Ronald Herring's editorial introduction asks how food is political, highlighting contention around the role of market, state and information in societal decisions. The first section of the handbook then examines technology, science and knowledge in food production. What is known - and disputed - about malnutrition, poverty and food security? The second section addresses ethics, rights and distributive justice: agrarian reform, gender inequality, entitlements and subsidies, and the social vision of the alternative food movement. The third section looks to intersections of agriculture and nature: wild foods, livestock, agro-ecological approaches to sustainability, and climate change and genetic engineering. The fourth section addresses food values and culture: political consumerism, labeling and certification, the science and cultural politics of food safety, values driving regulation of genetically modified foods and potential coexistence of GMOs, and organic and conventional crops. The fifth and final section looks at frontiers of global contentions: rival transnational advocacy networks, social movements for organic farming, the who and why of international land grabbing, junctures of cosmopolitan and local food narratives, the "supermarket revolution" and the international agrifood industry in low-income countries, and politics of knowledge in agricultural futures.

World water resources seem to be abundant; however, only 0.7% of this total amount is usable water. And owing to their nonuniform distribution, some countries have abundant water resources, whereas some others suffer from inadequate water, and even face severe water scarcity problems. Moreover, serious water pollution problems make 1/5 of the world’s population (approximately 1.1 billion people) under the risk of water-related diseases. In order to give a guideline to maintain the required quality of water according to the intended use, a group of international experts have come together to write this book. Authors target to pass recent available knowledge and information to the readers, who will vary from academicians, professional engineers and scientists, to undergraduate and graduate engineering students concerned with water quality problems all over the world. This book covers the main fields of Wastewater Treatment with 12 chapters, and uses knowledges in economic, information technologies, biology, etc. to make comprehensive analyses and applications.

This book explores the many dimensions of water quality problems in different parts of the globe, with focus on problems of governance, from legal frameworks to social discourses and compensation measures. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.3 on Water and Sanitation emphasizes the centrality of improving water quality to attain sustainable development. Yet the obstacles to achieving this goal are significant. This book explores the variety of difficult, possibly intractable “wicked” problems of water quality governance around the world. Cases include the challenge of managing water from source to sea, exploring why attempts to do so have come up short in limiting harm to the Great Barrier Reef; differing social discourses on market based instruments in Canada; efforts to bring to closure the human legacies of Minamata methyl mercury poisoning half a century ago in Japan; current problems of mercury use in Andean mining; misalignment of established Eastern European water laws with those of the EU; water quality markets in China; the impacts of service coverage and quality on low income households in countries from New Zealand to Bangladesh and Malawi; the importance of perceptions, ranging from the use of treated wastewater by farmers in the MENA region to consumers in Fukushima and to users of the artificial river in Beijing’s Olympic Park; and finally the confluence of wicked problems in refugee camps facing COVID. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Water International.

Public programs are designed to reach certain goals and beneficiaries. Methods to understand whether such programs actually work, as well as the level and nature of impacts on intended beneficiaries, are main themes of this book.

Building water-wise cities is a pressing need nowadays in both developed and developing countries. This is mainly due to the limitation of the available water resources and aging infrastructure to meet the needs of adapting to social and environmental changes and for urban liveability. This is the first book to provide comprehensive insights into theoretical, systematic, and engineering aspects of water-wise cities with a broad coverage of global issues. The book aims to (1) provide a theoretical framework of water-wise cities and associated sustainable water systems including key concepts and principles, (2) provide a brand-new thinking on the design and management of sustainable urban water systems of various scales towards a paradigm shift under the resource and environmental constraints, and (3) provide a technological perspective with successful case studies of technology selection, integration, and optimization on the “fit-for-purpose” basis.

Agricultural operations can contribute to water quality deterioration through the release of several materials into water: sediments, pesticides, animal manures, fertilizers and other sources of inorganic and organic matter. This ''guidelines'' document on control and management of agricultural water pollution has the objectives of delineating the nature and consequences of agricultural impacts on water quality, and of providing a framework for practical measures to be undertaken by relevant professionals and decision-makers to control water pollution.