Abstract
An increasingly gloomy picture is painted by research focusing on the environmental challenges faced by our planet. Biodiversity loss is ongoing, landscapes continue to transform, and predictions on the effects of climate change worsen. Calls have been made for urgent action to avoid pushing our planet into a new system state. One of the principal threats to biodiversity is intensive agriculture, and in particular the livestock industry, which is an important driver of greenhouse gas emissions, habitat degradation and habitat loss. Ongoing intensification of agricultural practices mean that farmland no longer provides a habitat for many species. We suggest the use of a growing policy tool, biodiversity offsetting, to tackle these challenges. Biodiversity offsetting, or ecological compensation, assesses the impacts of new development projects and seeks to avoid, minimise and otherwise compensate for the ecological impacts of these development projects. By applying biodiversity offsetting to agriculture, the impacts of progressively intensifying farming practices can be compensated to achieve conservation outcomes by using tools like environmental taxes or agri-environment schemes. Low intensity, traditional, farming systems provide a number of benefits to biodiversity and society, and we suggest that the consumer and the agriculture industry compensate for the devastating ecological impacts of intensive farming so that we can once again preserve biodiversity in our landscapes and attempt to limit global temperature rise below 2°c.
Highlights
Research studies and governmental reports have highlighted the extreme challenges that our planet faces (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2014; Newbold et al, 2016; Ripple et al, 2017), amongst others because of the life-style choices that we as humans have made
Several aspects of human’s way of life need to change for a future sustainable planet, but in this short communication we focus on the livestock industry given its contribution to climate change (Gerber et al, 2013) and domination of land-use practices of our planet (Ramankutty et al, 2008), both of which have severe consequences for
Policymakers may feel that our proposition is idealistic and resistance from farmers and consumers is to be expected, yet a change in our farming system is urgently needed (Godfray et al, 2018)
Summary
Research studies and (inter) governmental reports have highlighted the extreme challenges that our planet faces (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2014; Newbold et al, 2016; Ripple et al, 2017), amongst others because of the life-style choices that we as humans have made. The principal drivers of biodiversity loss include habitat loss and degradation, overexploitation, pollution and climate change (Barnosky et al, 2011; Butchart et al, 2010; Vitousek et al, 1997). Threats to biodiversity are emerging due to a rapidly changing climate with uncertain, potentially large consequences for numerous species (Warren et al, 2018). Climate change has been identified as one of the drivers that may push the Earth system into a new state (Steffen et al, 2015). The 2 °C limit already accepts that we will face several global challenges, and beyond this the impacts become ever more severe (Warren et al, 2018)
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