Beyond 'land sparing versus land sharing': environmental heterogeneity, globalization and the balance between agricultural production and nature conservation

By R. Grau, Tobias Kuemmerle, L. Macchi. 2013

240 citations recorded by the source corpus.

By addressing the trade-offs between food production and biodiversity conservation at landscape and ecoregion scales, the land sparing/sharing debate has made a significant contribution to land use science. However, as global population and food consumption grow, and urbanization and transnational trade intensify, land use trade-offs need to be analyzed at broader scales. These analyses should specifically consider the role of environmental heterogeneity on biodiversity distribution and agricultural suitability, the costs and benefits transferred far away from the focal land use, institutional and economic factors influencing stability and resilience, technology-related factors as mediators of agriculture suitability, and bundles of different environmental services. In addition, land use strategies to balance agriculture and biodiversity conservation must consider local socioeconomic constraints and trade-offs.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1511879aa627198473491cb0c951370b9121891d

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Citations in the corpus

Land Sparing Versus Land Sharing: Moving Forward (2014, background): “…example, both implementing a land sparing system (e.g., through forest protection) or maintaining a land sharing system (e.g., by foregoing maximum yields) in one region can cause leakage effects in which agriculture is displaced to another region through trade (Seto et al. 2012; Grau et al. 2013).”
The Emerging Soybean Production Frontier in Southern Africa: Conservation Challenges and the Role of South‐South Telecouplings (2016, background): “Conservation and land management policies implemented in one region may thus lead to a displacement of land-use pressure (Lenzen et al. 2012; Meyfroidt et al. 2013) and understanding these mechanisms is important for identifying effective conservation strategies (Grau et al. 2013).”
Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America (2016, background): “…all human use, as opposed to the difficult and messy process of agro-ecological harmonization through diversified working landscapes, the so called ‘land sharing’ approach to biodiversity conservation (Peres and Zimmerman 2001; Laurance et al. 2012; Grau et al. 2013; Macchi, Grau, and Marinaro.”
Trends in Global Agricultural Land Use: Implications for Environmental Health and Food Security. (2018, background): “Their proposal has been widely criticized since (53, 65, 170).”
Leading the way to a European circular bioeconomy strategy (2017, background): “…related risks through land use optimization addressing trade-offs and synergies between multiple ecosystem services (see Figure 5), targeting a clever mix of land sharing and land sparing options at landscape scale depending on local needs and opportunities (Grau et al. 2013; Pedroli et al. 2013).”
Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land: Leverage places to mitigate impacts on SDG2 and on the Earth System (2019, background): “Yet, it is acknowledged that our current scientific knowledge is inadequate to appropriately quantify the tradeoffs of land use at applicable decision-making scales (DeFries et al., 2004; J Fischer et al., 2014; Grau et al., 2013).”
Reshaping agri-environmental subsidies: From marginal farming to large-scale rewilding (2015, background): “Because uncertainties remain, we call for more theoretical and ecological research, especially on land-use trade-offs analyzed at regional and/or sub-continental scales and taking into account environmental heterogeneity, biodiversity distribution, agricultural suitability, ecosystem services and so”