Global cropland could be almost halved: Assessment of land saving potentials under different strategies and implications for agricultural markets.

Julia M Schneider,Florian Zabel,Franziska Schünemann,Ruth Delzeit,Wolfram Mauser,Francesco Caracciolo

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0263063

Abstract

The pressure on land resources continuously increases not only with the rising demand for agricultural commodities, but also with the growing need for action on global challenges, such as biodiversity loss or climate change, where land plays a crucial role. Land saving as a strategy, where agricultural productivity is increased to allow a reduction of required cropland while sustaining production volumes and meeting demand, could address this trade-off. With our interdisciplinary model-based study, we globally assess regional potentials of land saving and analyze resulting effects on agricultural production, prices and trade. Thereby, different land saving strategies are investigated that (1) minimize required cropland (2) minimize spatial marginalization induced by land saving and (3) maximize the attainable profit. We find that current cropland requirements could be reduced between 37% and 48%, depending on the applied land saving strategy. The generally more efficient use of land would cause crop prices to fall in all regions, but also trigger an increase in global agricultural production of 2.8%. While largest land saving potentials occur in regions with high yield gaps, the impacts on prices and production are strongest in highly populated regions with already high pressure on land. Global crop prices and trade affect regional impacts of land saving on agricultural markets and can displace effects to spatially distant regions. Our results point out the importance of investigating the potentials and effects of land saving in the context of global markets within an integrative, global framework. The resulting land saving potentials can moreover reframe debates on global potentials for afforestation and carbon sequestration, as well as on how to reconcile agricultural production and biodiversity conservation and thus contribute to approaching central goals of the 21st century, addressed for example in the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement or the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

Highlights

With rising global demand for agricultural commodities for food, feed, bioenergy, and the emerging bioeconomy, the pressure on land as a resource and production factor continuously increases [1,2,3,4]
The largest land saving potentials can be realized under Biophysical land saving (BLS), when crop production is focused on high-yielding cropland
The lowest land saving potential can be realized for sugar cane and sugar beet, crops that are often cultivated with a high degree of intensification and show rather low yield gaps

Summary

Introduction

With rising global demand for agricultural commodities for food, feed, bioenergy, and the emerging bioeconomy, the pressure on land as a resource and production factor continuously increases [1,2,3,4]. Land for biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and further ecosystem services is crucial to tackle main challenges of the 21st century, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, which are addressed in the Sustainable Development Goals [5]. The resulting potential for biodiversity conservation is controversially discussed within the debate on land-sparing vs land-sharing [12,13,14,15,16,17], as there is clear evidence of negative effects of agricultural intensification on biodiversity and ecosystems, such as freshwater depletion, soil erosion, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, habitat homogenization or the loss of habitat availability for wild species [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion