Growing competition for land, water and energy call for global strategies ensuring affordable food production at minimum environmental impacts. Economic modelling studies suggest trade-off relationships between environmental sustainability and food prices. However, evidence based on empirical cost-functions supporting such trade-offs remains scarce at the global level. Here, based on cost engineering modelling, we show that optimised spatial allocation of 10 major crops, would reduce current costs of agricultural production by approximately 40% while improving environmental performance. Although production inputs per unit of output increase at local scales, a reduction of cultivated land of 50% overcompensates the slightly higher field-scale costs enabling improved overall cost-effectiveness. Our results suggest that long-run food prices are bound to continue to decrease under strong environmental policies. Policies supporting sustainability transitions in the land sector should focus on managing local barriers to the implementation of high-yield regenerative agricultural practices delivering multiple regional and global public goods.
The achievement of several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement depends on rapid progress towards sustainable food and land systems in all countries. We have built a flexible, collaborative modeling framework to foster the development of national pathways by local research teams and their integration up to global scale. Local researchers independently customize national models to explore mid-century pathways of the food and land use system transformation in collaboration with stakeholders. An online platform connects the national models, iteratively balances global exports and imports, and aggregates results to the global level. Our results show that actions toward greater sustainability in countries could sum up to 1 Mha net forest gain per year, 950 Mha net gain in the land where natural processes predominate, and an increased CO2 sink of 3.7 GtCO2e yr-1 over the period 2020-2050 compared to current trends, while average food consumption per capita remains above the adequate food requirements in all countries. We show examples of how the global linkage impacts national results and how different assumptions in national pathways impact global results. This modeling setup acknowledges the broad heterogeneity of socio-ecological contexts and the fact that people who live in these different contexts should be empowered to design the future they want. But it also demonstrates to local decision-makers the interconnectedness of our food and land use system and the urgent need for more collaboration to converge local and global priorities.
<p>Increasing competing demands for land, water and energy along with increasing word population call for strategies to minimise environmental impacts while producing adequate food for 9 billion people. Studies have highlighted trade-offs between yields, biodiversity and socioeconomic goals in alternative land management solutions that share or spare agricultural land, pointing out the necessity of demand-side adjustments to meet environmental and food security goals. On the contrary, research has demonstrated that agricultural intensification through sparing and sharing agricultural land at global scales has the capacity to close yield gaps, reduce land requirements and increase biodiversity. Here we address the fundamental question: Would agricultural systems produce adequate food under a land sharing and targeted sparing scenario at lower financial costs? Optimal allocation of agricultural production, based on biophysical constraints, enables increased efficiencies and thus, we hypothesize that production is going to be less costly at global scales. To address this question, a cost engineering method is employed using crop modelling and inventory data on 16 crops to assess financial implications of sharing and sparing production scenarios. Preliminary findings demonstrate that at national scales, where there are potentials for greater and more efficient food production, there is larger spatial aggregation of production systems and thus higher costs that relate to large inputs of nutrients required to close yield gaps. Further forthcoming research will allow the identification of financial balances at global scales and enable the present study to confirm that current production volumes can be maintained at lower financial and environmental costs.</p>
Integration of crop and livestock production systems (ICLS) represents a method for enhancing the sustainability of agricultural systems. Introducing more diversified farm production plans increases profitability and resilience by minimising the negative environmental impacts of agricultural production. Examining farm businesses located in Less Favoured Areas (LFAs) of England, we investigate how conversion into more integrated systems impacts on profitability. Thus, providing knowledge that can enable structural changes on the farm level towards enhancing financial performance and the sustainable intensification of the production system. Through Linear Programming (LP), four distinct optimisation scenarios are estimated, demonstrating the different dynamics between more specialised and more integrated-diversified (intensified) production systems. Data regarding physical and financial performances of 139 farm businesses were derived from the Farm Business Survey (FBS) for the accounting year of 2013–2014. Our findings suggest that there is a lot of potential for increasing profitability of hill farms through optimisation of ICLS. Policy interventions may accommodate productivity challenges within the LFAs via the construction of networks of transferrable knowledge to enable farmers gain knowledge on benefits emerging from ICLS. Hence, promote strategies and risk mitigation practises that could allow hill farmers to develop a sustainably intensified production system that is maximising the production capacity of the available natural resources.
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