ORIGINAL PAPER Tracking phosphorus security: indicators of phosphorus vulnerability in the global food system Dana Cordell & Stuart White Received: 12 January 2015 /Accepted: 18 February 2015 /Published online: 31 March 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht and International Society for Plant Pathology 2015 Abstract Phosphorus underpins global food systems by ensur- ing soil fertility, farmer livelihoods, agricultural productivity and global food security. Yet there is a lack of research and effective governance at global or national scales designed to ensure the future availability and accessibility of this global resource. The world’ s main source of phosphorus, phosphate rock, is a finite resource that is becoming increasingly scarce, expensive and subject to geopolitical tensions as one country, Morocco, controls three-quarters of the world’ s remaining high-grade reserves. Given the criticality of phosphorus and the vulnerability of the world’ s food systems to phosphorus scarcity, there is a strong need to stimulate appropriate sustainable phosphorus practices and technologies, and simultaneously, to initiate effective inter- national governance mechanisms, including policy/research co- ordination and accountability. Sustainability indicators are in- creasingly being used as tools to facilitate accountability, imple- mentation, evaluation and communication for global sustainabil- ity challenges. This paper presents the first comprehensive set of phosphorus vulnerability and security indicators at global and national scales. Global indicators include: phosphate price, mar- ket concentration and supply risk, relative physical phosphorus scarcity and eutrophication potential. National indicators include: farmer phosphorus vulnerability, national phosphorus vulnerabil- ity, national phosphorus equity and soil phosphorus legacy. Monitoring and tracking such indicators at the national and global levels can ultimately provide evidence of key phosphorus vulner- abilities or ‘hotspots’ in the food system, support effective phosphorus governance to stimulate targeted and effec- tive action, raise awareness of this food security chal- lenge, and evaluate the effectiveness and performance of global or national sustainable phosphorus projects. Keywords Phosphorus scarcity . Food security . Indicators . Vulnerability . Governance . Accountability Introduction Like water and energy, phosphorus is a crucial input for food production. The element phosphorus is essential for all life, including plants, animals and bacteria, and is required by crops for growth and fruit and seed development (Johnston 2000). As an essential nutrient together with nitrogen and potassium, phosphorus has no substitute and therefore under- pins food security. While the significance of phosphorus in soils and plants has been relatively well established over the past half-century (Syers et al. 2008), the future availability and accessibility of this global resource for food security has re- ceived less scientific and policy scrutiny until recent years (Cordell and White 2014). Phosphorus scarcity: a new global challenge for food security Almost all the world’ s farmers today depend on a single source of phosphorus for fertilizers: mined phosphate rock. Historically local and renewable sources of phosphorus in manure and human excreta were used to maintain soil fertility. The accelerated use of mined phosphate rock in the mid-20th century, together with the introduction of the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing nitrogen fertilizers, underpinned the Green Revolution which dramatically boosted global crop yields and fed billions of people (IFPRI 2002). However these benefits have come at a serious cost: the essentially one-way flow of phosphorus from mines to oceans via agriculture is D. Cordell (*) : S. White Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSWPO Box 123, Australia 2007 e-mail: Dana.Cordell@uts.edu.au Food Sec. (2015) 7:337–350 DOI 10.1007/s12571-015-0442-0