Mark Mulligan

speaker

10 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 2 May

Mark Mulligan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Does it take 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef? · 2 May 2026 podcast

So I'm Professor Mark Mulligan, and I'm Professor of Physical and Environmental Geography at King's College London.

So my late colleague at King's College London, Tony Allen, came up with the concept of virtual water in the early 90s.

So Tony's concept for virtual water is that when a crop grows or when an animal like a cow eats a crop that's growing, they...

consume, if you like, all of the water that that crop had to evaporate over its lifetime in order to produce the biomass that is the crop.

He developed the concept for drylands in the Middle East.

In that context, when you're growing a crop, you're usually growing it with irrigation water from groundwater and rivers.

So, for example, if we have a cropland that is growing coffee, let's say, in Brazil, well, that probably replaced forests that was there before in that kind of humid, wet environment.

And indeed, the forest would have consumed through evaporation more water than the coffee crop does.

So in that case, the water footprint of the coffee crop is actually negative.

Because the forest is gone, you actually have more water than you would have had if the forest was there.

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