Paolo D'Odorico
The 2025 John Dalton Medal is awarded to Paolo D'Odorico for outstanding scholarship on water and its ties to environmental justice, energy, and food security.
Paolo D’Odorico is a leading expert on ecohydrology, focusing on the globalisation of water through virtual water trade and international land investments, and its impact on water equity, societal resilience, environmental stewardship, and food security. His work has led to a new understanding of the role of water in the global food system and challenges the prevailing views that food insecurity is an economic problem that is independent of the availability of natural resources. While the world produces enough food to feed humanity, the current food supply is based on an unsustainable use of natural resources, including water. D’Odorico’s group pioneered the analysis of water-related constraints on agricultural production, determining the extent to which agriculture intensification is limited by water availability and identifying rainfed areas that are suitable for a sustainable irrigation expansion worldwide. D’Odorico highlighted the impact of climate change on irrigation and investigated the economic value of water in agriculture by developing a biophysical method that can be used to determine the value of water in the agricultural sector. This has provided an important tool for estimating the value of irrigation water in regions where water is not priced. He then developed a comprehensive “food-energy-water nexus” perspective on the competition for water between agriculture and energy systems focusing on climate change solutions by negative emission systems such as carbon capture and storage.
In a related area, D’Odorico’s research in ecohydrology focuses on how vegetation can improve its own habitat, thereby enhancing its access to limiting resources or reducing disturbance pressure. These mechanisms can contribute to positive feedback between the vegetation and its environment, leading to alternative stable states in ecosystem dynamics. D’Odorico investigated these dynamics through field observations, wind tunnel experiments, and manipulative experiments in arid ecosystems, dry tropical forests, freshwater wetlands, and shallow coastal lagoons. His work on “desert margins” has led to new paradigms of desertification that include feedbacks between plant communities and wind erosion, microclimate, and fire regimes. He has also established a link between desertification and ocean productivity. While most research on global change focuses on the response of ecosystems to alterations in mean climate variables, he has examined the effects of changes in variance and shown how variations in precipitation can cause new states, new bifurcations, and the formation of patterns in ecosystem dynamics.
D'Odorico has revolutionized the study of ecohydrology and socio-ecological systems. His publications and commitment to the hydrological community are commendable and have also inspired Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports on the "State of Food & Agriculture".