Combining land-sparing and land-sharing in European landscapes

Abstract

Reconciling biodiversity conservation with increasing demand for agricultural production is a major challenge. A long-running discourse that addresses this challenge is the land-sparing vs land-sharing debate. However, the land-sparing vs land-sharing framework has also been criticized for favouring a dichotomous worldview, which contradicts the real-world complexity of agricultural landscapes. Here, we review land-sparing and land-sharing measures with a focus on European landscapes. Land-sparing is needed to preserve the last of Europe's wilderness (2.2% of the land) but will fail to conserve traditional agroecosystems and a wealth of synanthropic species with a long-history of human land-use influence. This is why land sparing should be combined with wildlife-friendly land-sharing practices needed for the preservation of these low-intensity agroecosystems, including European High Nature Value Farmland (15–25% of the land), which is of outstanding conservation value. By promoting generalist species associated with wildlife-friendly farming, land-sharing also enhances ecosystem services provision to agriculture, including pollination and biological pest control. Current land-sharing practices cover multiple spatial scales from local (e.g. wildflower strips) to field (e.g. organic farming) to landscape scale (e.g. diversified farming systems). In addition, productivity outcomes of land-sharing vary greatly, from comparatively high productivity (e.g. pastures for organic production) to agroecosystems that no longer provide any economic returns and are managed mostly for conservation purposes (e.g. dry grasslands). From an economic point of view, the latter may even be defined as land-sparing, highlighting that land-sparing and land-sharing sensu stricto are merely the endpoints of a spare-share continuum of the many agricultural practices in European landscapes. The best biodiversity outcomes and potentially smallest ecological-economic trade-offs result from landscape management that combines measures like agri-environment schemes and organic farming with small field sizes and high crop diversity to enhance spatial and temporal resource complementarity for associated species. Despite increasing progress towards win-win solutions, biodiversity-productivity trade-offs remain widespread, nonetheless. Multifunctional landscapes should therefore include elements from both land-sparing (e.g. natural ecosystems, intensively managed arable fields) and land-sharing (e.g. organic agriculture, agri-environment schemes) to halt declines of farmland biodiversity under increasing agricultural demand. Landscape heterogeneity is key to facilitate landscape connectivity, to avoid species extinctions in spared natural habitats and to promote spillover of organisms and ecosystem services from shared landscape elements to agricultural land. To halt ongoing losses of farmland biodiversity and to promote sustainable multifunctional landscapes, the post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union should better reflect the need for agricultural diversification, sustainable agricultural practices and greater landscape heterogeneity.