Winners and losers of national and global efforts to reconcile agricultural intensification and biodiversity conservation

Abstract

Closing yield gaps within existing croplands, and thereby avoiding further habitat conversions, is a prominently and controversially discussed strategy to meet the rising demand for agricultural products, while minimizing biodiversity impacts. The agricultural intensification associated with such a strategy poses additional threats to biodiversity within agricultural landscapes. The uneven spatial distribution of both yield gaps and biodiversity provides opportunities for reconciling agricultural intensification and biodiversity conservation through spatially optimized intensification. Here, we integrate distribution and habitat information for almost 20,000 vertebrate species with land-cover and land-use datasets. We estimate that projected agricultural intensification between 2000 and 2040 would reduce the global biodiversity value of agricultural lands by 11%, relative to 2000. Contrasting these projections with spatial land-use optimization scenarios reveals that 88% of projected biodiversity loss could be avoided through globally coordinated land-use planning, implying huge efficiency gains through international cooperation. However, global-scale optimization also implies a highly uneven distribution of costs and benefits, resulting in distinct "winners and losers" in terms of national economic development, food security, food sovereignty or conservation. Given conflicting national interests and lacking effective governance mechanisms to guarantee equitable compensation of losers, multinational land-use optimization seems politically unlikely. In turn, 61% of projected biodiversity loss could be avoided through nationally focused optimization, and 33% through optimization within just 10 countries. Targeted efforts to improve the capacity for integrated land-use planning for sustainable intensification especially in these countries, including the strengthening of institutions that can arbitrate subnational land-use conflicts, may offer an effective, yet politically feasible, avenue to better reconcile future trade-offs between agriculture and conservation. The efficiency gains of optimization remained robust when assuming that yields could only be increased to 80% of their potential. Our results highlight the need to better integrate real-world governance, political and economic challenges into sustainable development and global change mitigation research.

The erosion of relational values resulting from landscape simplification

“…1b). Around the world, landscapes are increasingly shaped by global (rather than only local) drivers (Wu 2013;Dorninger et al 2017), including land use (Egli et al 2018) and climate change (Mandryk et al 2012;Prober et al 2017), or questionable policy and scientific framings (Fischer et al 2014a, b). These, in turn, stem from global population growth and changing consumption patterns, which foster massive geographically removed demand for agricultural goods, be they food, feed or fuel (Khoury et al 2014).…”

Conventional land‐use intensification reduces species richness and increases production: A global meta‐analysis

“…However, recent scientific debates on closing yield gaps or conserving biodiversity in agroecosystems have addressed the effects of land use either on agricultural production or biodiversity conservation (e.g. Newbold et al, ; Mauser et al, ; but see Denmead et al, , Garibaldi et al, ; Egli, Meyer, Scherber, Kreft, & Tscharntke, ). A notable exception that includes both perspectives is the land sharing‐sparing framework (Chappell & LaValle, ; Phalan, Balmford, Green, & Scharlemann, ; Phalan, Onial, Balmford, & Green, ).…”

Stories of Favourite Places in Public Spaces: Emotional Responses to Landscape Change

“…Here, maize cultivation increased from~11% of the total agriculturally used land in Lower Saxony to~21% in 2016 [10,11]. Other widespread contemporary changes in landscapes include changes in social composition (e.g., in traditional cultural landscapes where smallholder farming is being lost) [12], changes in the landscape horizon (e.g., through wind parks, deforestation or re-forestation [13]), and widespread losses in biodiversity [14].…”