This is where our phosphorus comes from today: mines. Photo: Susan Drackett/Flickr.
Most of us have heard about peak oil – the fact that oil production won’t increase forever, but will level out and thereafter start to decrease. Having constructed a world where oil is what drives the whole machinery of society, this will have enormous consequences for all of us.
But oil isn’t the only resource we are pushing towards its limits. Earlier I have heard scientists talk about “peak water”, the point where clean water won’t any longer be able to meet our demands. And working with the latest issue of the climate magazine Effekt, that I am running together with a group of colleagues, I stumbled upon the term “peak phosphorus”.
Arno Rosemarin, who is a researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute and have looked into this issue for many years, told me how today’s large industrialised farms use more and more phosphorous.
Phosphorous is a chemical element which is essential for all living beings. We take it up through our food, and normally nature has its own way of recycling phosphorus, going from the soil into plants, and then returning to the soil when the plants decompose or through animal’s excrements.
With our toilet system, and with modern agriculture, we humans have broken this cycle, though. Now industrialised large-scale farms take their phosphorus from mines, and much of it ends up in watercourses, causing eutrophication.
In about 30 years from now the production from these phosphorus mines will start to decrease, says Arno Rosemarin, and his predictions that food prices will multiply and that geopolitical conflicts will arise of the remaining phosphorus resources are to say the least no good bedtime stories.
There are solution, he tells me. Our sanitary system can be restructured and farms can go back to using the natural phosphorus cycle. But, says Arno Rosemarin: a sustainable agricultural system won’t be able to feed a growing world population.
Sometimes, even as a journalist, I wish scientists could just end interviews by saying “Don’t worry, it will be fine”. But Arno Rosemarin wouldn’t give me that consolation.
“It’s going to be tough”, he says.
