Over the past 100 years, socioeconomic development has been ceaselessly putting great pressure on our freshwater resources. It has led to overwhelming and undermining nature’s ability to provide key functions and services, i.e. growing water scarcity and deterioration of water-related environment and ecosystems worldwide. The establishment of the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, therefore not only articulates the augmented concerns on water sustainability issues in the global political agenda, but also highlights that all countries (stakeholders) committed to translating the global goals and targets to national (own) targets and indicators, along with their individual challenges and corresponding opportunities of accounting for mutual benefit and win-win cooperation. The European Union (EU) (developed) and China (developing), as the second and third largest economies respectively, have been addressing sustainable development as an overarching objective for policy-making on the economic, social, and environmental dimensions, and working accordingly in a balanced and integrated manner. They have been joining forces, as equal partners, for better water through the China Europe Water Platform (CEWP) built in 2012, which provides a unique prospective to insight into how the EU and China have been making unremitting efforts for pursuing water sustainability, as well as the characteristics of action plans on SDG 6 implementation between the EU and China. The principal aim of this study is to comprehend (1) the status quo of the EU and China’s progress on SDG 6 targets, (2) how the EU and China can take forward implementation in partnership to enable and accelerate progress towards achieving SDG 6, and (3) how the EU and China can go beyond SDG 6 to establish linkages across the 2030 Agenda in the context of water-energy-food nexus. The highlights to fill the aforementioned knowledge gaps can be portrayed as follows: (1) the EU and China could develop a national indicator system together regarding SDG 6 targets, (2) the EU and China could establish a national indicator database together, in accordance with the national indicator system, and (3) the EU and China could conduct a lesson learned workshop together, in terms of equitable, participatory, and transparent SDG 6 policy process.

Besides posing soaring pressure on water and land resources, the ever-intensifying agricultural production redistributes these pressures trough increasingly intensive trade. Environmental consequences are complicated and unprecedented, and postulate thorough scrutiny. Little attention is paid to developing regions which are small nodes in global trade however of visible gaps in water and land productivities. Here we evaluate, among five Central Asian nations (CANs) and China, the water and land footprints, virtual water and land trades, as well as potentials in enhancing water and land efficiency related to agricultural production and trade. We find that the blue water footprint and land footprint per unit product in CANs were up to 61- and 17-times higher than in China. Through enhancing water and land efficiency without further intervention in water and land endowments, the scenario for CANs shows an additional food supply for feeding 387 million people or half the starving population in the world.

Eating less livestock products can reduce agricultural resource use, but it has also been argued that a portion of livestock products does sustainably contribute to food security. Given that diet change impacts arise through modification of food production systems, evaluating such changes requires explicit modelling of system dynamics. This paper uses a novel global integrated optimisation model, “Aalto OptoFood”, to investigate changes in water use when replacing livestock protein with plant-based protein sources in human diets and reallocating associated cropland and pasture. Our findings reveal that the first cuts are the deepest – moderate reductions in livestock protein decrease water consumption more than suggested by comparing global average crop and livestock water productivities. Further reductions show diminishing returns, with no clear optimum. In terms of water use, it is beneficial to eat less livestock products, even if there is no clear case for or against universal adoption of a vegan diet.