Global impacts of future cropland expansion and intensification on agricultural markets and biodiversity

By Florian Zabel, Ruth Delzeit, J. Schneider, Ralf Seppelt, Wolfram Mauser, Tomás Václavík. Nature Communications, 2019

595 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With rising demand for biomass, cropland expansion and intensification represent the main strategies to boost agricultural production, but are also major drivers of biodiversity decline. We investigate the consequences of attaining equal global production gains by 2030, either by cropland expansion or intensification, and analyse their impacts on agricultural markets and biodiversity. We find that both scenarios lead to lower crop prices across the world, even in regions where production decreases. Cropland expansion mostly affects biodiversity hotspots in Central and South America, while cropland intensification threatens biodiversity especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, India and China. Our results suggest that production gains will occur at the costs of biodiversity predominantly in developing tropical regions, while Europe and North America benefit from lower world market prices without putting their own biodiversity at risk. By identifying hotspots of potential future conflicts, we demonstrate where conservation prioritization is needed to balance agricultural production with conservation goals. The increase in needs for agricultural commodities is projected to outpace the growth of farmland production globally, leading to high pressure on farming systems in the next decades. Here, the authors investigate the future impact of cropland expansion and intensification on agricultural markets and biodiversity, and suggest the need for balancing agricultural production with conservation goals.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73e51fa3a24484b97d618b147e3406aedc0b7d51

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

Jianguo Liu

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability (2020, background): “Sustainable trajectories that achieve biodiversity targets and sustainable development goals entail a major escalation of conservation and restoration efforts (Díaz et al., 2019; Mace et al., 2018; Zabel et al., 2019).”
Global maps of cropland extent and change show accelerated cropland expansion in the twenty-first century (2021, methodology): “1 N2 ∑H h=1 N(2)h (1 − nh/Nh) s(2)yh/nh × 100 (6)”