Limits to agricultural land for retaining acceptable levels of local biodiversity

Arkaitz Usubiaga-Liaño (), Georgina M. Mace and Paul Ekins
Additional contact information
Arkaitz Usubiaga-Liaño: UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources
Georgina M. Mace: UCL Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research
Paul Ekins: UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources

Nature Sustainability, 2019, vol. 2, issue 6, 491-498

Abstract: Abstract Several studies have proposed maximum allowable areas of cropland (12.6–15.18% of terrestrial area) as environmental sustainability requirements, yet none have so far considered the minimum biodiversity levels required to support ecosystem functioning at acceptable levels. Here, we use a decision tree-based optimization model to estimate the maximum area of cropland and pasture that would meet—or come closest to meeting—the acceptable levels of local biodiversity proposed in the literature (90% local species abundance and 80% local species richness compared with an undisturbed baseline). We model four scenarios under which we vary two key sources of uncertainty: the maximization function and the potential of secondary vegetation to maintain biodiversity. The model finds that a maximum of 4.62–11.17% of the global ice-free land can be allocated to cropland (and 7.86–15.67% to pasture) to meet these biodiversity constraints—a lower level than was suggested in previous studies. The results are very sensitive to the minimum acceptable biodiversity values and the biodiversity response factors used, but the size of the disparity between current cropland area and our results suggests that actions to limit or reduce the area dedicated to agriculture should feature more prominently in policy discussions.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0300-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natsus:v:2:y:2019:i:6:d:10.1038_s41893-019-0300-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/natsustain/

DOI: 10.1038/s41893-019-0300-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Sustainability is currently edited by Monica Contestabile

More articles in Nature Sustainability from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().