COSAS member and Senior Instructional Professor of the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) Sabina Shaikh released her latest publication this past December. Shaikh co-authored the piece entitled “Riverine food environments and food security: a case study of the Mekong River, Cambodia” through the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. 

The piece explores a “critical but often overlooked part of food systems”: rivers. “They have multiple functions that support the food security, nutrition, health and livelihoods of the communities surrounding them. However, given current unsustainable food system practices, damming and climate change, the majority of the world’s largest rivers are increasingly susceptible to environmental degradation, with negative implications for the communities that rely on them. The piece describes the dynamism and multifaceted nature of rivers as food environments (i.e. the place within food systems where people obtain their food) and their role in securing food security including improved diets and overall health.” Shaikh then explores these concepts through the Mekong River in Cambodia.

Shaikh and her co-authors have high hopes for the work’s implications. “Developing and articulating food-related, ecosystem-specific frameworks and their constructs can guide implementation of policies aimed to improve specific public health or environmental sustainability outcomes. Our conceptual framework incorporates the multiple dimensions of rivers, which will aid future work and public health policy framing to better describe, understand and intervene to ensure protection of rivers’ biodiversity and ecosystems as well as food security, health and livelihoods.”

The publication can be read here.

Congratulations to Professor Shaikh on this great accomplishment.