To close the yield-gap while saving biodiversity will require multiple locally relevant strategies

By S. Cunningham, S. Attwood, K. Bawa, T. Benton, L. Broadhurst, Raphael K. Didham, S. McIntyre, I. Perfecto, M. Samways, T. Tscharntke and 4 more. 2013

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasing yield has emerged as the most prominent element in strategies to deal with growing global demand for food and fibre. It is usually acknowledged that this needs to be done while minimising harm to the environment, but historically land-use intensification has been a major driver of biodiversity loss. The risk is now great that a singular focus on increasing yields will divert attention from the linked problem of biodiversity decline, and the historical pattern will continue. There are options that increase yields while reducing harm to biodiversity, which should be the focus of future strategies. The solutions are not universal, but are locally specific. This is because landscapes vary greatly in inherent biodiversity, the production systems they can support, and the potential for them to be adopted by landholders. While new production techniques might apply at local scale, biodiversity conservation inevitably requires strategies at landscape and larger scales.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f8e6b625d206275fe8bc423736f7acfa524a783

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Experimental evidence that the effectiveness of conservation biological control depends on landscape complexity (2015, background): “Although true ‘win–win’ scenarios for food security and biodiversity conservation remain elusive, or limited in scope, there have been significant steps forward in the development of strategies for sustainable agriculture (Cunningham et al. 2013).”
Does intensification slow crop land expansion or encourage deforestation (2014, background): “Impacts of intensification on biodiversity depend not only on the share of cropland in the landscape but also the contrast between the agricultural production system and the endemic ecosystem (Cunningham et al., 2013).”
Sustainable intensification in agriculture: the richer shade of green. A review (2017, background): “They will likely also not converge because some forms of sustainable intensification are evidently more local or territorial than others (Cunningham et al. 2013; Duru et al. 2015).”
Crop management modifies the benefits of insect pollination in oilseed rape (2015, background): “through crop pollination, or biological pest control), has been proposed as a promising approach to handle this delicate balance (Cunningham et al., 2013).”