Coupled social and land use dynamics affect dietary choice and agricultural land-use extent

Saptarshi Pal,Chris T Bauch,Madhur Anand

doi:10.1038/s43247-021-00255-y

Saptarshi Pal, Chris T Bauch + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00255-y

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Abstract

Dietary patterns have long been a driver of global land use. Increasingly, they also respond to it, in part because of social processes that support adoption of eco-conscious diets. Here we develop a coupled social-and-land use mathematical model parameterised for 153 countries. We project global land use for future population, income, and agricultural yield using our coupled dynamical model. We find that coupled social-and-land feedbacks can alter the peak global land use for agriculture by up to 2 billion hectares, depending on the parameter regime. Across all yield scenarios, the model projects that social dynamics will cause an increase in eco-conscious dietary behaviour until the middle of the 21st century, after which it will decline in response to declining land use caused by a shrinking global population. The model also exhibits a regime of synergistic effects whereby simultaneous changes to multiple socio-economic parameters are required to change land use projections. This research demonstrates the value of including coupled social-and-land feedbacks in land use projections.

Highlights

Dietary patterns have long been a driver of global land use
Our work shows that coupled social-and-land processes can have large impacts on land use projections, ranging in the giga-hectares, and should be incorporated in global land-use modeling, along with other more established factors such as economic forces and the impacts of climate change
We focused on the effect of ballooning global land use as a stimulus for individuals to adopt more eco-conscious diets, against a backdrop where rising incomes permit individuals to opt for landintensive diets

Summary

Introduction

Dietary patterns have long been a driver of global land use They respond to it, in part because of social processes that support adoption of eco-conscious diets. We project global land use for future population, income, and agricultural yield using our coupled dynamical model. The model projects that social dynamics will cause an increase in eco-conscious dietary behaviour until the middle of the 21st century, after which it will decline in response to declining land use caused by a shrinking global population. Dietary patterns can heavily influence trajectories of global land use[20,23,24,25,26] and individuals include environmental factors while making dietary decisions[27,28], and land-use dynamics and socially influenced dietary choices are coupled to one another through two-way feedback. Interest has grown in coupling dynamic social learning models to models of natural processes such as the global climate system[37,38] and terrestrial ecosystems[39] social learning dynamic models have not been applied to study coupled dynamics of global land use for food production and dietary decision-making in human populations, to our knowledge

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