Land-use futures in the shared socio-economic pathways

By A. Popp, Katherine Calvin, Shinichiro Fujimori, Petr Havlík, Florian Humpenöder, Elke Stehfest, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, J. Dietrich, Jonathan C. Doelmann, Mykola Gusti and 14 more. 2017

939 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract In the future, the land system will be facing new intersecting challenges. While food demand, especially for resource-intensive livestock based commodities, is expected to increase, the terrestrial system has large potentials for climate change mitigation through improved agricultural management, providing biomass for bioenergy, and conserving or even enhancing carbon stocks of ecosystems. However, uncertainties in future socio-economic land use drivers may result in very different land-use dynamics and consequences for land-based ecosystem services. This is the first study with a systematic interpretation of the Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSPs) in terms of possible land-use changes and their consequences for the agricultural system, food provision and prices as well as greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, five alternative Integrated Assessment Models with distinctive land-use modules have been used for the translation of the SSP narratives into quantitative projections. The model results reflect the general storylines of the SSPs and indicate a broad range of potential land-use futures with global agricultural land of 4900 mio ha in 2005 decreasing by 743 mio ha until 2100 at the lower (SSP1) and increasing by 1080 mio ha (SSP3) at the upper end. Greenhouse gas emissions from land use and land use change, as a direct outcome of these diverse land-use dynamics, and agricultural production systems differ strongly across SSPs (e.g. cumulative land use change emissions between 2005 and 2100 range from −54 to 402 Gt CO2). The inclusion of land-based mitigation efforts, particularly those in the most ambitious mitigation scenarios, further broadens the range of potential land futures and can strongly affect greenhouse gas dynamics and food prices. In general, it can be concluded that low demand for agricultural commodities, rapid growth in agricultural productivity and globalized trade, all most pronounced in a SSP1 world, have the potential to enhance the extent of natural ecosystems, lead to lowest greenhouse gas emissions from the land system and decrease food prices over time. The SSP-based land use pathways presented in this paper aim at supporting future climate research and provide the basis for further regional integrated assessments, biodiversity research and climate impact analysis.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/383d9c0078ec986cad328ad6bad8e2196d6f92da

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Citations in the corpus

Biodiversity impacts and conservation implications of urban land expansion projected to 2050 (2022, neutral): “Strong economic growth, a population that peaks and declines in the 21st century, and incompletely regulated land use that slowly reduces the rates of tropical deforestation produce moderate levels of environmental pressure (23, 24).”
Exploring SSP land-use dynamics using the IMAGE model: Regional and gridded scenarios of land-use change and land-based climate change mitigation (2018, neutral): “As the global population (KC and Lutz, 2017), income (Dellink et al., 2017) and food consumption (Alexandratos and Bruinsma, 2012; Popp et al., 2017) are expected to continue to increase, it is likely that human demands placed on the land system will continue to increase as well.”
Large-scale bioenergy production: how to resolve sustainability trade-offs? (2018, methodology): “The general setup of our scenarios including food demand is based on the SSP2 ‘middle-of-the-road’ storyline for the land use sector, which represents a continuation of current social, economic, and technological trends into the future [42].”
The Sustainability Conundrum of Fishmeal Substitution by Plant Ingredients in Shrimp Feeds (2019, background): “9 billion ha (which is approximately 40% of the total land surface in 2005) [25] (FAO, 2014) currently occupies 91% of the approximately 5.”
Peatland protection and restoration are key for climate change mitigation (2020, methodology): “We here use data from the ‘REMIND-MAgPIE—SSP226’ pathway, which is not the so-calledmarker representation of SSP2-26.”
Comparing impacts of climate change and mitigation on global agriculture by 2050 (2018, methodology): “The land use and agricultural sector implications of ambitious climate change stabilization policies,without taking intoaccount the climate change impacts, were recently analysed in a multi-model setup within the SSP-RCP framework by Popp et al (2017).”
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS): Global potential, investment preferences, and deployment barriers (2018, background): “Significant improvements have been made in recent years to better capture biomass availability and land use effects by integrating dedicated land use models [3].”
Future air pollution in the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (2017, background): “energy system, land use and greenhouse gas emissions in the SSP scenarios (Bauer et al., 2017; Popp et al., 2017).”