Potential net primary production footprint of agriculture: A global trade analysis

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the most important sources of biomass for human society but increasingly contributes to anthropogenic degradation of ecosystems through negative impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, climate change, and ecosystem services. Here we estimate NPPpot agricultural footprint, that is, the level of appropriation of potential net primary production (NPPpot) by global cropland and human‐made pastures from the consumer responsibility (footprint) perspective and reveal the role of international trade. To quantify the NPPpot agricultural footprint, we utilize environmentally extended multi‐regional input–output analysis to attribute the terrestrial potential NPP altered by global cropland and human‐made pastures to the final consumers responsible for pulling the supply chains. We identify the NPPpot of geographically specific cropland area of 186 agricultural crops in 236 countries and we track each of those crops through the global web of international trade and supply chains to the point of final consumption. We show that human society appropriates 20% (13 petagrams of carbon per year) of global potential net primary production by the transformation of natural ecosystems into cropland and human‐made pastures. International trade accounts for 23% of global NPPpot footprint of agriculture. While the two and half billion people living in China and India (the two countries with lowest NPPpot agricultural footprint per capita) appropriate about 16% of the global NPPpot agricultural footprint of cropland and human‐made pastures, the same share is appropriated by only 360 million people living in countries with the highest per capita footprint.

FABIO—The Construction of the Food and Agriculture Biomass Input–Output Model

“…This approach was further developed by Weinzettel and Wood 20 and applied to calculate footprints for biodiversity, 21 scarce water use, 22 and net primary production. 23 A similar approach is applied by Croft et al, 24 but going one step further for selected processed products such as vegetable oils. Liang et al 10 presented a 30-sector, mixed-unit PIOT for China to investigate material flows by aggregated product groups.…”

Adding country resolution to EXIOBASE: impacts on land use embodied in trade

“…More immediately, we chose land use as it is a simple and key indicator of agricultural related impacts. The application of biodiversity characterization factors (Verones et al 2017) and net-primary productivity (Kastner et al 2015;Weinzettel et al 2019) are simple extensions to obtain more policy-relevant work. Furthermore, the correlation (Silva Simas et al 2017) of land use with other agricultural impacts such as blue water consumption (Lutter et al 2016) and eutrophication (Hamilton et al 2018) gives a good basis for further extension.…”

“…Disaggregation of sectors is argued by Weinzettel et al (2014) to be an important future development of MRIOs, and can replace the hybrid approaches applied to overcome this limitation today. Already we are seeing the linking of detailed FAO production and use data to both aggregated and disaggregated MRIO tables (Weinzettel et al 2019) and even the construction of country-specific physical input-output tables (Bruckner et al 2019).…”

Global trade in the Anthropocene: A review of trends and direction of environmental factor flows during the Great Acceleration

“…They went predominantly from sparsely populated regions in the Americas and Oceania to densely populated regions in Europe and East Asia, seemingly independent of development or income status (cf. Erb et al, 2009;Haberl et al, 2009Haberl et al, , 2012Moran et al, 2013), although Weinzettel et al (2019) suggest a bias towards affluent imports. Teixidó-Figueras et al (2016) conclude that consumption-based so-called eHANPP is more equally distributed than territorial HANPP, so that trade plays a directly equalising role.…”