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Food systems depend on reliable supplies of phosphorus to fertilize soils. Since 2020, a pandemic, geopolitical disputes, trade wars and escalating fuel prices have driven a >400% increase in phosphorus commodity prices, contributing to the current food crisis. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has disrupted phosphate trade further. Concurrently, phosphorus losses to freshwaters, through insufficient municipal wastewater treatment and inappropriate fertilizer use and land management practices, are a significant threat to water quality globally. Despite precariously balanced food and water security risks, nations are largely unaware of their “phosphorus vulnerability” and phosphorus is markedly absent in national and global policies addressing food and water security. Phosphorus vulnerability can be described as the degree to which people/systems are susceptible to harm due to the physical, geopolitical and socio-economic dimensions of global phosphorus scarcity and pollution. Here, we bring the current price spike into focus, highlighting the drivers, policy responses and their consequences. We highlight the need for an integrated assessment of phosphorus vulnerability that considers environmental, socio-economic and climate change risks across scales. We illustrate how reducing phosphorus waste, increasing phosphorus recycling, and wider system transformation can reduce national reliance on imported phosphorus, whilst enhancing food and water security. The current crisis in fertilizer prices represents a wake-up call for the international community to embrace the global phosphorus challenge.

Food systems depend on reliable supplies of phosphorus to fertilize soils. Since 2020, a pandemic, geopolitical disputes, trade wars and escalating fuel prices have driven a >400% increase in phosphorus commodity prices, contributing to the current food crisis. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has disrupted phosphate trade further. Concurrently, phosphorus losses to freshwaters, through insufficient municipal wastewater treatment and inappropriate fertilizer use and land management practices, are a significant threat to water quality globally. Despite precariously balanced food and water security risks, nations are largely unaware of their “phosphorus vulnerability” and phosphorus is markedly absent in national and global policies addressing food and water security. Phosphorus vulnerability can be described as the degree to which people/systems are susceptible to harm due to the physical, geopolitical and socio-economic dimensions of global phosphorus scarcity and pollution. Here, we bring the current price spike into focus, highlighting the drivers, policy responses and their consequences. We highlight the need for an integrated assessment of phosphorus vulnerability that considers environmental, socio-economic and climate change risks across scales. We illustrate how reducing phosphorus waste, increasing phosphorus recycling, and wider system transformation can reduce national reliance on imported phosphorus, whilst enhancing food and water security. The current crisis in fertilizer prices represents a wake-up call for the international community to embrace the global phosphorus challenge.

Global food security remains threatened as many farmers struggle to afford sufficient phosphorus fertiliser for their crops. Meanwhile, overuse of fertilisers and sewage pollution pump millions of tonnes of phosphorus into lakes and rivers each year, damaging biodiversity and affecting water quality. This report is a comprehensive global analysis of the challenges and possible solutions to the phosphorus crisis. The report calls on governments across the world to adopt a '50, 50, 50' goal: a 50 per cent reduction in global pollution of phosphorus and a 50 per cent increase in recycling of the nutrient by the year 2050. The report has been written by a team of 40 international experts from 17 countries led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) and the University of Edinburgh.

The deposition of livestock urine and feces in grazed fields results in a sizable input of available nitrogen (N) in these soils; therefore significantly increasing potential nitrogen pollution from agricultural areas in the form of nitrous oxide (N2O), ammonia (NH3), and nitrate (NO3−). Livestock deposition events contributes to high spatial variability within the field and generate uncertainties when assessing the contribution that animal waste has on nitrogen pollution pathways. This study investigated an innovative technique for identifying the spatial coverage of urine deposition in grasslands without the need for manual soil measurements. A Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) using a twin camera system was used to identify urine patches in a 5 ha field, which had been grazed by sheep 3 weeks previous to measurements. The imagery was processed using Agisoft Photoscan (Agisoft LLC) to produce true and false color orthomosaic imagery of the entire field. Imagery of five areas (225 m2) within the field were analyzed using a custom R script. For a total of 1,125 m2 of grassland, 12.2% of the area consisted of what was classified as urine patch. A simple up-scaling method was applied to these data to calculate N2O emissions for the entire field providing an estimate of 1.3–2.0 kg N2O-N ha−1 emissions from urine and fertilizer inputs.