Pathways to sustainable land use and food systems in Canada

Abstract

Meeting global sustainability targets under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement requires paying attention to major land-use sectors such as forestry and agriculture. These sectors play a large role in national emissions, biodiversity conservation, and human well-being. There are numerous possible pathways to sustainability in these sectors and potential synergies and trade-offs along those pathways. This paper reports on the use of a model for Canada’s land use to 2050 to assess three different pathways (one based on current trends and two with differing levels of ambition for meeting sustainability targets). This was done as part of a large international consortium, Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land and Energy (FABLE), which allows for incorporating international trade in meeting both national and global sustainability targets. The results show not only the importance of increasingly stringent policies in meeting the targets, but also the role that population and consumption (e.g., diets) play in meeting the targets. Both the medium and high ambition sustainability pathways can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions while protecting forestland. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-022-01213-z.

Integrated modeling to achieve global goals: lessons from the Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land-use, and Energy (FABLE) initiative

“…All the papers show that, if current trends continue, future changes in food production, consumption, and land use will make it impossible to achieve biodiversity, freshwater use, food security, and climate mitigation targets by 2050. Yet, many papers also show that implementing current policy pledges will be insufficient to reverse the situation, and countries will still fall short of most targets without more ambitious pledges (Frank et al 2022;Jha et al 2022;Lehtonen and Rämö, 2022;Smith and Harrison et al 2022;Zerriffi et al 2022). Integrating pathways from the 12 countries represented in this special feature together with those from all other regions in the world shows that a lack of national ambition will make it challenging to meet global targets, particularly on biodiversity conservation (FABLE 2022b) and climate mitigation (FABLE 2021).…”

“…While in some countries, there is a need to increase consumption of certain foods to close nutrition gaps and improve diet-related health outcomes, in others, too much food is consumed. Simply reducing consumption of calories and foods where these exceed nutritional requirements, such as in Canada (Zerriffi et al 2022), the UK (Smith et al 2022), and USA (Wu et al 2022), will help improve nutritional outcomes and reduce diet-related diseases in these countries while also helping achieve food security at the global level.…”

“…In all countries, restoring more land to nature requires reducing the area used for other purposes, principally agriculture. FABLE's work shows that the best strategies for achieving this are shifting diets toward less land-intensive foods, and increasing crop and livestock productivity, freeing up land for restoration (Frank et al 2022;González-Abraham et al 2022;Jha et al 2022;Lehtonen and Rämö, 2022;Navarro Garcia et al 2022;Perez-Guzman et al 2022;Rasche et al 2022;Smith and Harrison et al 2022;Zerriffi et al 2022). Of note, some restoration efforts to date have promoted single or exotic species which do little to restore native ecosystem functioning.…”

“…Papers in this special feature discuss that reducing food and resource demands, including by slowing population and economic growth, is another key leverage point for shifting to sustainable food and land-use systems (Navarro Garcia et al 2022;Zerriffi et al 2022). Humans account for 0.01% of all biomass on the planet, which is 20 times the estimated biomass of all wild terrestrial mammals ( Bar-On et al 2018).…”

Understanding the socio-economic causes of deforestation: a global perspective

“…This can be attributed partially to effective forest management practices, the transition toward a more serviceoriented economy, and dedicated reforestation efforts. Localized deforestation in this region can arise from urban expansion, wildfires, and insect infestations (Zerriffi et al, 2023).…”