Abstract
The global challenges of food security and biodiversity are rarely addressed together, though recently there has been an increasing awareness that the two issues are closely related. The majority of land available for agriculture is already used for food production, but despite the productivity gains, one in nine people worldwide are classified as food insecure. There is an increasing risk that addressing food insecurity through methods such as agricultural expansion or intensification could lead to biodiversity loss through destruction of habitats important for conservation. This analysis uses various indicators of biodiversity at a global scale, including biodiversity hotspots, total species richness, and threatened and endemic species richness. Areas where high biodiversity coexists with high food insecurity or a high risk of agricultural expansion, were examined and found to mainly occur in the tropics, with Madagascar standing out in particular. The areas identified are especially at risk of biodiversity loss, and so are global priorities for further research and for policy development to address food insecurity and biodiversity loss together.
Highlights
Conserving biodiversity and increasing food security are two of the world’s most pressing issues [1]
We develop an index of potential conflict between food security and biodiversity which represents the risk of natural resource exploitation
The National Biodiversity Index (NBI) from the Global Biodiversity Outlook produced by the Secretariat of the Convention of Biological Diversity was used [17]
Summary
Conserving biodiversity and increasing food security are two of the world’s most pressing issues [1]. Live in rural areas, relying heavily on ecosystem services for primary services and goods [4,5]. Those who directly utilise biodiversity resources do not often have any alternatives, and there is a risk of the short term incentives of food and materials outweighing the long term stability of the ecosystem [4]. The importance of biodiversity to food security in areas of poverty cannot be overstated [6], as rural, poorer populations rely more heavily on biodiversity and often encroach on forests to extract natural products, increasing pressure on local fauna and flora [3]. Conservation and poverty data have rarely been fully integrated [4] so there is a paucity of research addressing the connections between food security and biodiversity [1]
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