We were spared the famines of the 1970s, but one billion people around the world currently suffer from chronic hunger because the food we have doesn’t reach all of us. The bounty we have now thanks to the Green Revolution will only take us so far. According to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, agricultural yield will need to increase by 70 to 100 percent in order to meet the global food demand anticipated by 2050 when we reach 9 billion people. [

One way to have an immediate impact would be to simply limit the food we waste, which accounts for nearly half of what we grow in the United States. That adds up to about 1,400 calories per person per day, or 31 million tons of food per year that’s grown but never gets eaten. An enormous amount of energy is involved in planting, fertilizing, harvesting, packaging, shipping, storing, refrigerating, and preparing food that goes unconsumed. Wasted food is wasted energy. Conservative estimates out of the University of Texas at Austin suggest that wasted food accounts for at least two percent of the entire U.S. energy budget every year.

Along with that food and energy, we also lose a lot of water as Earth gets hotter and drier. Climate change doesn’t just make warm termpertures warmer, but wet regions wetter, storms deadlier, and droughts more severe. Scientists know that the water shortages we are experiencing in 2014 will get worse. Taking short showers and opting not to water your lawn has some influence on the water budget, but what most of us don’t realize is that the vast majority of water we do have goes toward agriculture through food, fuel, and fiber production. In the U.S. alone, agriculture accounts for 80 percent of our total water consumption. Unfortunately, much of that gets lost through to old leaky water technologies as well as simple oversight. Biologists and engineers are working to develop more drought tolerant crops that will require less water to grow. We can also boost federal investment in water treatment and infrastructure.

The answers to these limited resource challenges will be found through research and innovation. Yet if national priorities can be illustrated by where we spend tax money, the U.S. has not focused on finding solutions. The portion of our federal budget going toward research and development has decreased over the last 50 years. At the peak of the space race in the late 1960s, research and development accounted for nearly 12 percent of the total U.S. budget. Today we spend just over three percent on research and development.

Despite these figures, there’s data to suggest we can be optimistic about the future—and parents are part of the reason why. In my role at the University of Texas at Austin, I survey national attitudes related to energy and the environment. Over the past few years, I started to notice that people with children tend to be more concerned about the environment than the general population and more interested in changing their behavior to be smarter consumers. For example, parents are consistently more likely to acknowledge that climate change is occurring. They also express more interest in purchasing energy efficient cars and installing solar panels. It sounds intuitive that parents feel they have a bigger stake in the future and want the best for their families, but now we have data demonstrating it’s true.