Sustainable pathways towards climate and biodiversity goals in the UK: the importance of managing land-use synergies and trade-offs

Abstract

Agricultural and environmental policies are being fundamentally reviewed and redesigned in the UK following its exit from the European Union. The UK government and the Devolved Administrations recognise that current land use is not sustainable and that there is now an unprecedented opportunity to define a better land strategy that responds fully to the interconnected challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and sustainable development. This paper presents evidence from three pathways (current trends, sustainable medium ambition, and sustainable high ambition) to mid-century that were co-created with UK policymakers. The pathways were applied to a national integrated food and land-use model (the FABLE calculator) to explore potential synergies and trade-offs between achieving multiple sustainability targets under limited land availability and constraints to balance food supply and demand at national and global levels. Results show that under the Current Trends pathway all unprotected open natural land would be converted to urban, agriculture and afforested land, with the consequence that from 2030 onwards tree planting targets could not be met. In contrast, the two sustainable pathways illustrate how dietary change, agricultural productivity improvements and waste reduction can free up land for nature recovery and carbon sequestration. This enables a transition to a sustainable food and land-use system that provides a net carbon sink with up to 44% of land able to support biodiversity conservation. We highlight key trade-offs and synergies, which are important to consider for designing and implementing emerging national policies. These include the strong dependence of climate, food and biodiversity targets on dietary shifts, sustainable improvements in agricultural productivity, improved land-use design for protecting and restoring nature, and rapid reductions in food loss and waste.

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.…”

“…Increasing crop and livestock productivity on the existing agricultural land has the advantage of limiting further land conversion, and can also reduce the existing agricultural land area, freeing up land for restoration. For example, in the UK, raising crop productivity was sufficient to free up 34,000 ha of agricultural land (Smith and Harrison et al 2022).…”

“…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.…”

“…In addition, GLOBIOM, MAgPIE, and the FABLE Calculator do not consider the biodiversity conservation and carbon storage and sequestration potential of agricultural land. Several authors point out that further work is needed to incorporate the contribution of improved agricultural land management to sustainability targets, such as zero-chemical agroecological practices and low-intensity livestock systems that incorporate trees and other natural vegetation covers (González-Abraham et al 2022;Smith and Harrison et al 2022). Such practices are likely to form a core part of sustainable futures particularly in countries with high pressure on land-use and little remaining natural land.…”