Estimating the world's potentially available cropland using a bottom-up approach

By Eric F. Lambin, Holly K. Gibbs, L. Ferreira, R. Grau, P. Mayaux, Patrick Meyfroidt, Douglas C. Morton, T. Rudel, I. Gasparri, J. Munger. 2013

308 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous estimates of the land area available for future cropland expansion relied on global-scale climate, soil and terrain data. They did not include a range of constraints and tradeoffs associated with land conversion. As a result, estimates of the global land reserve have been high. Here we adjust these estimates for the aforementioned constraints and tradeoffs. We define potentially available cropland as the moderately to highly productive land that could be used in the coming years for rainfed farming, with low to moderate capital investments, and that is not under intact mature forests, legally protected, or already intensively managed. This productive land is underutilized rather than unused as it has ecological or social functions. We also define potentially available cropland that accounts for trade-offs between gains in agricultural production and losses in ecosystem and social services from intensified agriculture, to include only the potentially available cropland that would entail low ecological and social costs with conversion to cropland. In contrast to previous studies, we adopt a "bottom-up" approach by analyzing detailed, fine scale observations with expert knowledge for six countries or regions that are often assumed to include most of potentially available cropland. We conclude first that there is substantially less potential additional cropland than is generally assumed once constraints and trade offs are taken into account, and secondly that converting land is always associated with significant social and ecological costs. Future expansion of agricultural production will encounter a complex landscape of competing demands and tradeoffs. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7694ea0d3a7d71525c940997e6ca98b8f086e872

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Citations in the corpus

Scarcity amidst abundance? Reassessing the potential for cropland expansion in Africa (2014, background): “…of land to foreign interests that might otherwise entail foreclosing indigenous communities’ access to 1 This study defines PAC in the same way as Lambin et al. (2013), i.e., the reserve of moderately to highly productive land that could be utilized for rainfed farming, that is not currently…”
Drivers of agricultural land-use change in the Argentine Pampas and Chaco regions (2018, unknown): “At even finer scales, a range of spatial determinants such as soil quality, climatic patterns, or socioeconomic characteristics influence where agricultural expansion and intensification take place (Golub & Hertel, 2008; Lambin et al., 2013; Lubowski, Plantinga, & Stavins, 2008; Meyfroidt, 2015).”
Long-term agricultural land-cover change and potential for cropland expansion in the former Virgin Lands area of Kazakhstan (2015, background): “…to optimistic expectations about untapped agricultural potentials on the abandoned agricultural lands in Kazakhstan (Liefert et al 2010, FAO 2011, Lambin et al 2013), our analysis of land-cover change and the increase of livestock density since 2000 ( ﬁ gures B1 (2) and (3)) showed that not much…”
Does intensification slow crop land expansion or encourage deforestation (2014, background): “A global analysis may also miss key constraints at the local level such as human diseases and unrecorded current land use that reduce effective land supply (Lambin et al., 2013).”
Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis (2015, background): “There is substantially less potential additional cropland than is generally assumed once ecological and socioeconomic constraints and trade-offs are taken into account (Lambin et al. 2013).”
The Emerging Soybean Production Frontier in Southern Africa: Conservation Challenges and the Role of South‐South Telecouplings (2016, background): “Both will further amplify land-use-related pressures on biodiversity (Leadley et al. 2010), particularly in the Global South that harbors the majority of biodiversity, and most undeveloped fertile lands (Lambin et al. 2013).”
Soil Degradation, Land Scarcity and Food Security: Reviewing a Complex Challenge (2016, methodology): “The assessment of the quality of land presently cropped is also an issue, as its level of degradation will affect demand for inputs, productivity, and eventually for new and more fertile land [6,14,24,32,62,68].”
Trade-offs between environment and livelihoods: Bridging the global land use and food security discussions (2017, unknown): “…of PAC (Deininger et al. 2011), but analyses in several key regions suggested that not more than 31% of the identified land could be cultivated without having to overcome strong constraints and with relatively low – though not inexistent - social and environmental trade-offs (Lambin et al. 2013).”