Land Sparing Versus Land Sharing: Moving Forward

By Jörn Fischer, D. Abson, Van Butsic, M. J. Chappell, Johan Ekroos, J. Hanspach, Tobias Kuemmerle, Henrik G. Smith, H. Wehrden. 2014

559 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To address the challenges of biodiversity conservation and commodity production, a framework has been proposed that distinguishes between the integration (“land sharing”) and separation (“land sparing”) of conservation and production. Controversy has arisen around this framework partly because many scholars have focused specifically on food production rather than more encompassing notions such as land scarcity or food security. Controversy further surrounds the practical value of partial trade‐off analyses, the ways in which biodiversity should be quantified, and a series of scale effects that are not readily accounted for. We see key priorities for the future in (1) addressing these issues when using the existing framework, and (2) developing alternative, holistic ways to conceptualise challenges related to food, biodiversity, and land scarcity.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b74b263caad04b1ba15a7b99bd6a3a92b6b6f97

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Citations in the corpus

Land sharing is essential for snow leopard conservation (2016, background): “In contemporary conservation planning these challenges are manifested in two paradigms, the “coexistence” (land sharing) and the “separation” (land sparing) models (Fischer et al., 2014; Chapron et al., 2014).”
Beyond the agroecological and sustainable agricultural intensification debate: Is blended sustainability the way forward? (2018, background): “The land sharing strategy focuses on less intensive production techniques to maintain biodiversity throughout the production process (Fischer et al., 2013, p. 1).”
The challenges and opportunities of coexisting with wild ungulates in the human-dominated landscapes of Europe's Anthropocene (2019, unknown): “These include the debates about land sparing vs land sharing (Fischer et al., 2014), the role of protected areas vs multi-use landscapes (Sayer, 2009), and sustainable use vs protectionist ideals (Cretois et al., 2019).”
Reshaping agri-environmental subsidies: From marginal farming to large-scale rewilding (2015, background): “…landscape/ecoregion scale in order to capture the heterogeneity of European landscapes, and it includes environmental history and socio-economic realities of human–natural systems (Fischer, Hartel, & Kuemmerle, 2012; Tscharntke et al., 2012; Grau, Kuemmerle, & Macchi, 2013; Fischer et al., 2014).”
Control of crop diseases through Integrated Crop Management to deliver climate-smart farming systems for low- and high-input crop production (2021, background): “This has been a research topic between the use of land- sharing and land- sparing tactics to combat food security and environmental impacts under climate change (Fischer et al., 2014).”
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).”
Optimizing land use decision-making to sustain Brazilian agricultural profits, biodiversity and ecosystem services (2016, background): “This emphasis has been criticized as limited in utility and impractical (Fischer et al., 2014; Kremen, 3 http://legislacao.pi.gov.br/legislacao/default/ato/13386.”
Could consumption of insects, cultured meat or imitation meat reduce global agricultural land use? (2017, background): “Livestock production also contributes to atmospheric greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, due to methane from enteric fermentation (presently 2.1 Gt CO2 eq year-1 (Gerber et al., 2013)), and nitrous oxide emissions from fertiliser use on pasture and croplands in fodder production (Smith et al., 2014).”
Addressing future trade-offs between biodiversity and cropland expansion to improve food security (2016, methodology): “moving forward from the bipolar framework (Fischer et al. 2014).”