This seminar will demonstrate that without access to safe water there can be no food security and nutrition. It will explore alternative and more locally appropriate ways to address complex water management and governance challenges from the local to global levels against a backdrop of growing climate and other related uncertainties. It will argue for the need to improve policy coherence across water, land and food and for strengthening the human rights to water and food to ensure healthy and productive lives and a climate resilient future for all. The seminar focuses on key findings of the book “Water for Food Security, Nutrition and Social Justice”. Authored by Lyla Mehta, Theib Oweis, Claudia Ringler, Barbara Schreiner and Shiney Varghese, it is the first comprehensive effort to bring together Water, Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) in a way that goes beyond the traditional focus on irrigated agriculture.

About the Speaker
Lyla Mehta is a Professor at the Institute of Development Studies and a Visiting Professor at Noragric, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She uses the case of water and sanitation to focus on the politics of scarcity, gender, human rights and access to resources, resource grabbing, and power and policy processes in rural, peri urban and urban contexts. Her work also focusses on climate change and uncertainty and forced displacement. She has extensive research and field experience in India and southern Africa and is currently leading a Belmont/ Norface/ EU/ ISC project on ‘Transformations as praxis’ in South Asia. Her most recent book is Water, Food Security, Nutrition and Social Justice (Routledge, 2020). She trained as a sociologist (University of Vienna) and has a Ph.D. in Development Studies (University of Sussex).