Land as a planetary boundary: a socioecological perspective

Helmut Haberl and Karl-Heinz Erb

Chapter 13 in Handbook on Growth and Sustainability, 2017, pp 277-300 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Land is indispensable for crucial socioeconomic functions, including food and energy supply or infrastructure, as well as for biodiversity, carbon sequestration and many other vital ecosystem services. Even though the global land area is well known, the role of land as a planetary boundary is difficult to grasp. This chapter discusses how a focus on net primary production – for example, the production of biomass by green plants through photosynthesis – can help to better understand possible limitations resulting from the finiteness of productive land. Based on data and modelling related to the human appropriation of net primary production we demonstrate how human societies have managed to raise supply of land-based products by (1) taking more from ecosystems and (2) raising efficiency in converting plant growth into products and services. The chapter concludes that planetary boundaries related to the net primary production may be expanded by investing more work, energy, or human ingenuity, but doing so is not without limitations and usually involves trade-offs and costs such as higher environmental impacts that may increase the risk of transgressing other boundaries such as those of nitrogen, phosphorous, water or biodiversity.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Environment; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781783473557.00021.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:15720_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().