Do increases in agricultural yield spare land for nature?

By Robert M. Ewers, Jörn P. W. Scharlemann, A. Balmford, R. Green. 2009

329 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Feeding a rapidly expanding human population will require a large increase in the supply of agricultural products during the coming decades. This may lead to the transformation of many landscapes from natural vegetation cover to agricultural land use, unless increases in crop yields reduce the need for new farmland. Here, we assess the evidence that past increases in agricultural yield have spared land for wild nature. We investigated the relationship between the change in the combined energy yield of the 23 most energetically important food crops over the period 1979–1999 and the change in per capita cropland area for 124 countries over the same period. Per capita area of the 23 staple crops tended to decrease in developing countries where large yield increases occurred. However, this was counteracted by a tendency for the area used to grow crops other than staples to increase in the countries where staple crop yields increased. There remained a weak tendency in developing countries for the per capita area of all cropland to decline as staple crop yield increased, a pattern that was most evident in developing countries with the highest per capita food supplies. In developed countries, there was no evidence that higher staple crop yields were associated with decreases in per capita cropland area. This may be because high agricultural subsidies in developed countries override any land‐sparing pattern that might otherwise occur. Declines in the area of natural forest were smaller in countries where the yield of staple crops increased most, when the negative effects of human population increases on forest area were controlled for. Our results show that land‐sparing is a weak process that occurs under a limited set of circumstances, but that it can have positive outcomes for the conservation of wild nature.

Subfields: Ecology, Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48f23ed94b63b5c5163f7a27c48157044b679726

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Citations in the corpus

A major shift to the retention approach for forestry can help resolve some global forest sustainability issues (2012, background): “, no additional lands are conserved (Ewers et al. 2009); and (2) key ecosystem processes, such as those that sustain productivity, can be compromised by intensive cropping of lands.”
Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity (2011, unknown): “The land sparing effect was nonexistent when all crops were taken into account, as nonstaple crops replaced staple crops when they were contracting (55).”
Retention Forestry to Maintain Multifunctional Forests: A World Perspective (2012, background): “Studies in agricultural systems point in different directions regarding the efficiency of zoning models, embracing the different categories of high-intensity agriculture, wildlife-friendly agriculture (the equivalent of retention forestry), and land for conservation (Ewers et al. 2009).”
Land property rights, agricultural intensification, and deforestation in Indonesia (2018, background): “Increasing agricultural yields on the land already cultivated, through higher input intensity and use of better technology, could be one important way to meet the rising demand and reduce further deforestation (Green et al., 2005; Ewers et al., 2009; Phalan et al., 2011a; Stevenson et al., 2013).”
To close the yield-gap while saving biodiversity will require multiple locally relevant strategies (2013, background): “production (Angelsen and Kaimowitz, 2001; Ewers et al., 2009), and is only likely to do so where regulation supports this outcome (Matson and Vitousek, 2006).”
Wildlife‐friendly oil palm plantations fail to protect biodiversity effectively (2010, background): “…finishes at “land sparing,” which involves spatially separating agriculture from biodiversity conservation by maximizing the productivity of agricultural lands to increase the area of contiguous natural ecosystems that can be protected for biodiversity (Green et al. 2005; Ewers et al. 2009).”
Impacts of climate change on plant diseases—opinions and trends (2012, background): “…the intensity of cultivation may enable the coexistence of biodiversity and crops in agro-ecosystems, but would allow remnant patches of natural ecosystems to shrink (land sharing) (Ewers et al. 2009; Clough et al. 2011; Lambin and Meyfroidt 2011; Lin 2011; Phalan et al. 2011; Fitter 2012).”