Globalization of land use: distant drivers of land change and geographic displacement of land use

Meyfroidt, Patrick; Lambin, Éric F.; Erb, Karl‐Heinz; Hertel, Thomas W.

doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2013.04.003

Cited by 517 publications

(320 citation statements)

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“…It has been observed that the international trade of food commodities induces a virtual transfer of embodied land [Kitzes et al, 2009], water [Allan, 1998], carbon [Kastner et al, 2011], nitrogen [Galloway et al, 2007], and other land based resources [e.g., Hermele, 2014], while most of the environmental impacts of agricultural production remain in the producing countries [Meyfroidt et al, 2013]. Thus, trade is associated with the globalization of resources [e.g., Hoekstra and Chapagain, 2008] its impact on food security [Fader et al, 2013].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It has been argued that the intensification of international trade has been one of the major factors contributing to changes in food supply in the past few decades [D'Odorico and Rulli, 2013]. Global trade has been found to account for 12% of the human appropriation of the net primary productivity and 24% of the global ecological (i.e., land) footprint [Erb et al, 2009;Weinzettel et al, 2013;Meyfroidt et al, 2013]. The extent to which global food security depends on international trade, however, remains poorly understood [Porkka et al, 2013].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Feeding humanity through global food trade

et al. 2014

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The recent intensification of international trade has led to a globalization of food commodities and to an increased disconnection between human populations and the land and water resources that support them through crop and livestock production. Several countries are not self-sufficient and depend on imports from other regions. Despite the recognized importance of the role of trade in global and regional food security, the societal reliance on domestic production and international trade remains poorly quantified. Here we investigate the global patterns of food trade and evaluate the dependency of food security on imports. We investigate the relationship existing between the trade of food calories and the virtual transfer of water used for their production. We show how the amount of food calories traded in the international market has more than doubled between 1986 and 2009, while the number of links in the trade network has increased by more than 50%. Likewise, global food production has increased by more than 50% in the same period, providing an amount of food that is overall sufficient to support the global population at a rate of 2700-3000 kcal per person per day. About 23% of the food produced for human consumption is traded internationally. The water use efficiency of food trade (i.e., food calories produced per unit volume of water used) has declined in the last few decades. The water use efficiency of food production overall increases with the countries' affluence; this trend is likely due to the use of more advanced technology.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feeding humanity through global food trade

et al. 2014

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“…Methods vary between cellular automata or rule-based approaches, empirical or statistical models, agent-based models, macroeconomic models, land-use accounting models, and integrated approaches that combine different methodologies (Alcamo et al 2006;Brown et al 2014). The increasing understanding of the complexity of land-use change and linkages within the earth system (e.g., land-use changes that depend on teleconnections, indirect land-use changes, or displacement) calls for reconsidering the traditional understanding of a closed system at one spatial scale (Arima et al 2011;Dalla-Nora et al 2014;Gollnow and Lakes 2014;Lapola et al 2010;Meyfroidt et al 2013;Richards et al 2014). However, such processes and feedbacks of indirect land-use changes from global to regional to local scales are rarely addressed in land-use modeling studies (Rosa et al 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scenarios of land-use change in a deforestation corridor in the Brazilian Amazon: combining two scales of analysis

et al. 2017

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Local, regional, and global processes affect deforestation and land-use changes in the Brazilian Amazon. Characteristics are: direct conversions from forest to pasture; regional processes of indirect land-use change, described by the conversion of pastures to cropland, which increases the demand for pastures elsewhere; and teleconnections, fueled by the global demands for soybeans as animal fodder. We modeled land-use changes for two scenarios Trend and Sustainable Development for a hot spot of land-use change along the BR-163 highway in Mato Grosso and Pará, Brazil. We investigated the differences between a coupled modeling approach, which incorporates indirect land-use change processes, and a noncoupled landuse model. We coupled the regional-scale LandSHIFT model, defined for Mato Grosso and Pará, with a subregional model, alucR, covering a selected corridor along the BR-163. The results indicated distinct land-use scenario outcomes from the coupled modeling approach and the subregional model quantification. We found the highest deforestation estimates returned from the subregional quantification of the Trend scenario. This originated from the strong local dynamics of past deforestation and landuse changes. Land-use changes exceeded the demands estimated at regional scale. We observed the lowest deforestation estimates at the subregional quantification of the Sustainable Development story line. We highlight that model coupling increased the representation of scenario outcomes at fine resolution while providing consistency across scales. However, distinct local dynamics were explicitly captured at subregional scale. The scenario result pinpoints the importance of policies to aim at the cattle ranching sector, to increase land tenure registration and enforcement of environmental laws.

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“…Population pressure results in an increasing demand for food and bio-energy products and hence also in an increasing demand for agricultural land (Meyfroidt et al, 2013;Tscharntke et al, 2012). This demand is in competition with the additional demand for land for residential, conservation, forestry, recreational, and other purposes (Zasada, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting production and ecosystem services on the farm scale for evaluating land use alternatives

Lerouge

Sannen²,

Gulinck

et al. 2016

Environmental Science & Policy

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Land is a scarce resource and should be used in such a way that the increasing global demand for food and feed can be fulfilled, while ensuring sufficient levels of ecosystem services. While the demand on open space to deliver a multitude of services is increasing, drivers like global change and urbanization are undermining these services. Decision makers, from individual farmers to spatial planners, are in need of appropriate diagnostic tools to estimate trade-offs and synergies associated with land allocation and land use intensity decisions. This often implies trade-offs between food and biomass production and other non-provisioning ecosystem services. This paper presents an assessment on the farm scale using an integrated approach that combines spatial and economic analyses. It relies on the ecosystem services concept to evaluate land use alternatives. The analysis highlights current challenges to reach a societal optimal land allocation. INTRODUCTIONPopulation pressure results in an increasing demand for food and bio-energy products and hence also in an increasing demand for agricultural land (Meyfroidt et al., 2013;Tscharntke et al., 2012). This demand is in competition with the additional demand for land for residential, conservation, forestry, recreational, and other purposes (Zasada, 2011). With land as an increasingly scarce resource, spatial planners seek to balance land use allocation among competing stakeholders. This has led to a polarization in land use policies between demands for expanding urbanized fabric and the remaining open space used for agriculture, whilst natural areas are largely pushed back to relatively small and fragmented relics. Spatial planning has mainly focused on allocation of land to space demanding sectors and minimizing spatial conflicts. This approach falls short in considering present-day demands for multifunctionality, sustainability, ecosystem services, resilience and adaptive governance. While an integrative and spatially explicit approach to land allocation is highly needed, it is largely missing (Bomans et al., 2010b;Termorshuizen and Opdam, 2009). Particularly in strongly urbanized regions, the relation between the availability and use of space, and the potential services this space is able to provide to society, needs to be explored further. Increasing service delivery per unit of space can allow a decreasing spatial requirement for delivering this service, and hence, freeing space for other services. Fragmented peri-urban landscapes in particular, where interfaces between different forms of land use and associated actors are plenty, are in need of innovative concepts for land use allocation. Meanwhile, concepts of multifunctionality and ecosystem services already bridge the distinction between classical sectors like agriculture, nature and forestry. In the light of food and biomass production, the principal challenge is to simultaneously assess and maximize production as well as the other ES provided by bioproductive land (Balmford et al., 2012) which inevi...

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Globalization of land use: distant drivers of land change and geographic displacement of land use

Cited by 517 publications

References 57 publications

Feeding humanity through global food trade

Feeding humanity through global food trade

Scenarios of land-use change in a deforestation corridor in the Brazilian Amazon: combining two scales of analysis

Revisiting production and ecosystem services on the farm scale for evaluating land use alternatives

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