For the success of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, it will no longer be sufficient to seek to limit biodiversity loss through agriculture. Instead, agriculture must become an integral element of sustainable landscapes a force for conserving biodiversity and providing vital ecosystem services to local populations and securing livelihoods.
Trees on Farms (TonF) play a critical role in contributing to biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes through in-situ conservation, by connecting fragmented wild habitats and providing stepping-stones between protected area networks and conserving soil biodiversity and agrobiodiversity. TonF are one of the key nature-based solutions to the conservation and food production challenges we face as they also play a critical role in achieving sustainable, biodiversity friendly agricultural landscapes.
Extreme weather events have severe impacts on food systems, especially for smallholders in global food value chains (GFVCs). There is an urgent need to understand (a) how climate shocks manifest in food systems, and (b) what strategies can enhance food system resilience. Integrating satellite, household and trade data, we investigate the cascading impacts after two consecutive hurricanes on smallholder banana farmers in Dominican Republic, and determinants of their recovery. We found that farmers experienced an ‘all-or-nothing’ pattern of damage, where 75% of flooded farmers lost > 90% of production. Recovery of regional production indicators took ca. 450 days. However, farm-level recovery times were highly variable, with both topographic and human capital factors determining recovery. Utilising this case study, we show that engaging in a GFVC impeded recovery via ‘double exposure’ of production loss and losing market access. Our results suggest that strategies to enhance resilience, with a particular focus on recovery, in GFVCs should promote trader loyalty, facilitate basin-scale collaboration and expand risk-targeted training.
With its whopping greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, enormous deforestation footprint, and massive waste lagoons (some visible even from space!), industrial animal agriculture is often dubbed the new fossil fuel. Dominated by a handful of mega-corporations, the livestock industry is already a major driver of the climate crisis.1 Given its projected growth, the industry is likely, by 2030, to use up 49% of the allowable budget for a relatively safe 1.5°C temperature rise.2 Yet, the climate commitments of big meat and dairy companies are little more than a cop-out. Their emissions reporting is inadequate at best, and fraught with greenwashing at worst. Despite this, between 2015 and 2020, 2,500 financial institutions ranging from high-street banks to pension funds and asset managers to universities shelled out over $478 billion USD to back meat and dairy operations globally.3 With stricter climate regulations on the horizon, these loans and investments run the risk of turning into “stranded assets,” suffering write-downs or devaluations.
Across the globe, the expansion of large-scale commodity agriculture is occurring not into empty space but over existing social systems. An understanding of the dynamics of expansion and associated impacts of commodity agriculture thus fundamentally requires examining how existing control regimes are dissolved and, simultaneously, how novel ones are assembled in order to make way for the changes in resources use that characterize these transitional moments. With this in mind, in this article, I provide a broad review of the strategies used to secure control over land prospected for agricultural commodity production, distinguishing between the tactics that are applied by agro-interested actors in order to ‘break down’ forms of existing land control, those they apply in parallel to ‘build up’ new control structures, and those strategies that are applied by actors (often smallholders) wishing to ‘hold on to’ the control that they have. I then present a framework for examining the dynamics of control transfer that builds on this analytical structure of ‘breaking down’, ‘building up’, and ‘holding on to’ control.
Modern agriculture has drastically changed global landscapes and introduced pressures on wildlife populations. Policy and management of agricultural systems has changed over the last 30 years, a period characterized not only by intensive agricultural practices but also by an increasing push towards sustainability. It is crucial that we understand the long-term consequences of agriculture on beneficial invertebrates and assess if policy and management approaches recently introduced are supporting their recovery. In this study, we use large citizen science datasets to derive trends in invertebrate occupancy in Great Britain between 1990 and 2019. We compare these trends between regions of no- (0%), low- (greater than 0–50%) and high-cropland (greater than 50%) cover, which includes arable and horticultural crops. Although we detect general declines, invertebrate groups are declining most strongly in high-cropland cover regions. This suggests that even in the light of improved policy and management over the last 30 years, the way we are managing cropland is failing to conserve and restore invertebrate communities. New policy-based drivers and incentives are required to support the resilience and sustainability of agricultural ecosystems. Post-Brexit changes in UK agricultural policy and reforms under the Environment Act offer opportunities to improve agricultural landscapes for the benefit of biodiversity and society.
Despite efforts to promote sustainable agriculture, food and agricultural production remain the main driver of global biodiversity loss. However, where food production conflicts with biodiversity conservation and which products and countries contribute the most has not been as comprehensively assessed. Based on spatial models of farming and conservation priority areas, we estimate how production and consumption of 48 agricultural commodities driven by 197 countries may conflict with conservation priorities for 7,143 species. This study provides a quantitative basis to better understand and manage the large-scale transformative changes between humanity and nature through decisions concerning food consumption, production, and trade.
Demand for food products, often from international trade, has brought agricultural land use into direct competition with biodiversity. Where these potential conflicts occur and which consumers are responsible is poorly understood. By combining conservation priority (CP) maps with agricultural trade data, we estimate current potential conservation risk hotspots driven by 197 countries across 48 agricultural products. Globally, a third of agricultural production occurs in sites of high CP (CP > 0.75, max = 1.0). While cattle, maize, rice, and soybean pose the greatest threat to very high-CP sites, other low-conservation risk products (e.g., sugar beet, pearl millet, and sunflower) currently are less likely to be grown in sites of agriculture–conservation conflict. Our analysis suggests that a commodity can cause dissimilar conservation threats in different production regions. Accordingly, some of the conservation risks posed by different countries depend on their demand and sourcing patterns of agricultural commodities. Our spatial analyses identify potential hotspots of competition between agriculture and high-conservation value sites (i.e., 0.5° resolution, or ~367 to 3,077km2, grid cells containing both agriculture and high-biodiversity priority habitat), thereby providing additional information that could help prioritize conservation activities and safeguard biodiversity in individual countries and globally. A web-based GIS tool at https://agriculture.spatialfootprint.com/biodiversity/ systematically visualizes the results of our analyses.
Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the world’s largest producers of cocoa, account for two thirds of the global cocoa production. In both countries, cocoa is the primary perennial crop, providing income to almost two million farmers. Yet precise maps of the area planted with cocoa are missing, hindering accurate quantification of expansion in protected areas, production and yields and limiting information available for improved sustainability governance. Here we combine cocoa plantation data with publicly available satellite imagery in a deep learning framework and create high-resolution maps of cocoa plantations for both countries, validated in situ. Our results suggest that cocoa cultivation is an underlying driver of over 37% of forest loss in protected areas in Côte d’Ivoire and over 13% in Ghana, and that official reports substantially underestimate the planted area (up to 40% in Ghana). These maps serve as a crucial building block to advance our understanding of conservation and economic development in cocoa-producing regions.
Land abandonment and rural depopulation are accelerating globally. In less than 50 years, the proportion of the human population living in rural areas has decreased by ∼25% (1). Abandonment takes many shapes, and no single definition has been accepted. Most often, land abandonment refers to a termination of agricultural activities for at least 5 years (to differentiate it from fallow land) and is quantified at the crop-field scale (2, 3). Other types of abandonment have received less attention, such as abandoned pastures, forestry areas, mines, factories, and entire human settlements. Here, “land abandonment” broadly captures the end of human activities. Since the 1950s, abandoned land has accumulated to up to 400 million ha globally (3), an area roughly half the size of Australia. Given this scale, there is an urgent need to develop a vision of how to achieve balanced benefits for biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and people’s livelihoods on abandoned land.
Wetland area in agricultural landscapes has been heavily reduced to gain land for crop production, but in recent years there is increased societal recognition of the negative consequences from wetland loss on nutrient retention, biodiversity and a range of other benefits to humans. The current trend is therefore to re-establish wetlands, often with an aim to achieve the simultaneous delivery of multiple ecosystem services, i.e., multifunctionality. Here we review the literature on key objectives used to motivate wetland re-establishment in temperate agricultural landscapes (provision of flow regulation, nutrient retention, climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation and cultural ecosystem services), and their relationships to environmental properties, in order to identify potential for tradeoffs and synergies concerning the development of multifunctional wetlands. Through this process, we find that there is a need for a change in scale from a focus on single wetlands to wetlandscapes (multiple neighboring wetlands including their catchments and surrounding landscape features) if multiple societal and environmental goals are to be achieved. Finally, we discuss the key factors to be considered when planning for re-establishment of wetlands that can support achievement of a wide range of objectives at the landscape scale.
The impact of local biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning is well established, but the role of larger-scale biodiversity dynamics in the delivery of ecosystem services remains poorly understood. Here we address this gap using a comprehensive dataset describing the supply of 16 cultural, regulating and provisioning ecosystem services in 150 European agricultural grassland plots, and detailed multi-scale data on land use and plant diversity. After controlling for land-use and abiotic factors, we show that both plot-level and surrounding plant diversity play an important role in the supply of cultural and aboveground regulating ecosystem services. In contrast, provisioning and belowground regulating ecosystem services are more strongly driven by field-level management and abiotic factors. Structural equation models revealed that surrounding plant diversity promotes ecosystem services both directly, probably by fostering the spill-over of ecosystem service providers from surrounding areas, and indirectly, by maintaining plot-level diversity. By influencing the ecosystem services that local stakeholders prioritized, biodiversity at different scales was also shown to positively influence a wide range of stakeholder groups. These results provide a comprehensive picture of which ecosystem services rely most strongly on biodiversity, and the respective scales of biodiversity that drive these services. This key information is required for the upscaling of biodiversity–ecosystem service relationships, and the informed management of biodiversity within agricultural landscapes.
Background
Land-use is a major driver of changes in biodiversity worldwide, but studies have overwhelmingly focused on above-ground taxa: the effects on soil biodiversity are less well known, despite the importance of soil organisms in ecosystem functioning. We modelled data from a global biodiversity database to compare how the abundance of soil-dwelling and above-ground organisms responded to land use and soil properties.
Results
We found that land use affects overall abundance differently in soil and above-ground assemblages. The abundance of soil organisms was markedly lower in cropland and plantation habitats than in primary vegetation and pasture. Soil properties influenced the abundance of soil biota in ways that differed among land uses, suggesting they shape both abundance and its response to land use.
Conclusions
Our results caution against assuming models or indicators derived from above-ground data can apply to soil assemblages and highlight the potential value of incorporating soil properties into biodiversity models.
Soil microbiomes drive key functions in agroecosystems, determining soil fertility, crop productivity and stress tolerance. The microbiome is intricately linked with soil structure, such as aggregation and pore connectivity, because this structure regulates the flow of water, oxygen and nutrients through the system. In this Review, we summarize the key functions of soil microbiomes in agroecosystems, highlight the dependence of these functions on the structural integrity of the soil, and discuss how agricultural practices influence the link between soil structure and microbiome functioning. System-level agricultural management practices can induce structural alterations to the soil, thereby changing the microbial processes occurring at the microscale. These changes have large-scale consequences, such as soil erosion, reduced soil fertility and increased greenhouse gas emissions. Sustainable approaches such as integrated soil fertility management and integrated pest management seek to improve soil structure and enhance microbial biodiversity, but we lack a mechanistic understanding of how multifaceted decisions at the farm level shape these context-dependent small-scale processes in the long term. Future research needs to bridge the microscale and field scale to inform agricultural management decisions for building climate-smart, resource-efficient and stress-resilient agroecosystems, and to harness the soil microbiome as a nature-based solution for sustainable agriculture.
Zero-deforestation supply chain policies that leverage the market power of commodity buyers to change agricultural producer behavior can reduce forest clearing in regions with rapid commodity expansion and weak forest governance. Yet leakage—when deforestation is pushed to other regions—may dilute the global effectiveness of regionally successful policies. Here we show that domestic leakage offsets 43-50% of the avoided deforestation induced by existing and proposed zero-deforestation supply chain policies in Brazil’s soy sector. However, cross-border leakage is insignificant (<3%) because soybean production is displaced to existing U.S. farmland. Eliminating deforestation from the supply chains of all firms exporting Brazilian soy to the EU or China from 2011-2016 could have reduced net global deforestation by 2% and Brazilian deforestation by 9%. Thus, if major tropical commodity importers (e.g., the EU) require traders to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains, it could help bend the curve on global forest loss.
There have been many calls for an agroecological transition to respond to food shocks and crises stemming from conventional food systems. Participatory action research and transformative epistemologies, where communities are research actors rather than objects, have been proposed as a way to enhance this transition. However, despite numerous case studies, there is presently no overview of how participatory approaches contribute to agroecological transitions. The present article therefore aims to understand the effect of applying participatory action research (PAR) in agroecology. We undertook a systematic review of articles reporting methods and results from case studies in agroecological research. On the one hand, our systematic review of 347 articles shows that the agroecological research scope is broad, with all three types—as science, a set of practices and social movement—well-represented in the corpus. However, we can see a clear focus on agroecology “as a set of practices” as the primary type of use of the concept. On the other hand, we found a few case studies (23) with a participatory approach while most studies used extractive research methods. These studies show that understanding the drivers and obstacles for achieving an agroecological transition requires long-term research and trust between researchers and farmers. Such transformative epistemologies open doors to new questions on designing long-term PAR research in agroecology when confronted with a short-term project-based society.
Sustainable management of intact tropical peatlands is crucial for climate change mitigation, for biodiversity conservation and to support the livelihoods of local communities. Here, we explore whether sustainable fruit harvesting from Mauritia flexuosa palms could support these linked goals by increasing fruit production and incomes across the 2.8 million hectares of the most carbon-dense ecosystem in Amazonia: the lowland peatlands of northeastern Peru. M. flexuosa is dioecious, and fruits are typically harvested by felling female palms; the proportion of female palms therefore provides a good indicator of the health of a stand. Across 93 widely distributed sites, we found that the proportion of female palms increases with travel time to the urban market, and overall, fruit harvesting has halved the current potential production and income from this resource. However, significantly more female palms are found where fruit are harvested by climbing. We estimate that region-wide uptake of climbing could eventually increase potential fruit production by 51% and increase its gross value to US$62 ± 28.2 million yr–1. These findings demonstrate the high cost of unsustainable resource extraction in Neotropical forests and outline a practical path to conserve and sustainably exploit one of the most carbon-rich landscapes on the planet.
The new frontiers of sustainable cities should focus on urban planning tools and strategies that are able to integrate ecosystem services in urban development. An important step could include the design of nature-based solutions (NbSs) for introducing important ecological functions aiding human well-being and mitigating the loss of soil. In this study, we propose a methodology to analyse, in a spatial way, the effect of land use scenarios generated by urban planning in the provision of ecosystem services. The methodology analyses the variation of ecosystem services, considering the ecosystem services of the study area and their potential roles in changing the functions of planned urban actions as the starting point. One scenario of analysis includes the integration of NbSs into urban planning. The case study is that of a peri-urban area, characterized by an agroecosystem, which is intended for urban development in the municipality of Gallipoli, Southern Italy. The analysis highlights a low provision of ecosystem services by the agroecosystem, which has had the effect of important olive trees being destroyed by Xylella fastidiosa bacteria. Thus, the integration of NbSs and reducing the construction of buildings in the urban neighbourhood plan could improve the quantity of ecosystem services in the area. Moreover, the ecological design of ecosystem services could improve the typology of ecosystem services provision in the area in consideration of the starting points. Therefore, the analysis of the capacity to integrate ecosystem services in urban planning at the neighbourhood scale could be a tool of ecological urban design, useful to support the decision-making processes.
Entering the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, interventions referred to as nature-based solutions (NBS) are at the forefront of the sustainability discourse. While applied in urban, natural forest or wetland ecosystems, they are underutilized in agricultural landscapes. This paper presents a technical framework to characterise NBS in agricultural systems. NBS in the agriculture sector is proposed as “the use of natural processes or elements to improve ecosystem functions of environments and landscapes affected by agricultural practices, and to enhance livelihoods and other social and cultural functions, over various temporal and spatial scales.” The framework emerges from a review of 188 peer-reviewed articles on NBS and green infrastructure published between 2015 and 2019 and three international expert consultations organized in 2019–2020. The framework establishes four essential functions for NBS in agriculture: 1) Sustainable practices — with a focus on production; 2) Green Infrastructure — mainly for engineering purposes such as water and soil, and slope stabilization; 3) Amelioration — for restoration of conditions for plants, water, soil or air and climate change mitigation; and 4) Conservation — focusing on biodiversity and ecosystem connectivity. The framework connects the conventional divide between production and conservation to add functionality, purpose and scale in project design. The review confirmed limited evidence of NBS in agricultural systems particularly in developing country contexts, although specific technologies feature under other labels. Consultations indicated that wider adoption will require a phased approach to generate evidence, while integrating NBS in national and local policies and agricultural development strategies. The paper concludes with recommended actions required to facilitate such processes.
Bangladesh is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change because of its flat and low-lying topography. The country’s coastal areas are most susceptible to river erosion, flooding, tropical cyclones, salinity intrusion, and tidal surges. Natural and human-induced hazards and disasters have a ripple effect on the ecosystem, resulting in the loss of human lives, property, and the valuable resources needed for human subsistence. The review summarizes the current literature, highlighting the vulnerability index, local-level adaptation strategies, and future research work. The reviewed literature
has reported common hazards like tropical cyclones and tidal waves that can cause tidal floods and riverbank erosion, all of which have a high-to-medium impact on the structure of homes, income, wealth, and employment. Agriculture is the most vulnerable sector in the coastal areas. Aquaculture, shrimp, open-water fish collection, and infrastructure are all vulnerable to disasters in coastal areas. The widely used vulnerability indexes are Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI), Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI) and principal components (PCs) reported in the literature. The local level adaptation strategy is to build the house on high land using bamboo and wood. The pond/gher bound ponds by the net to protect fish from the overflow water, put soil on the gher dike, and sell fish as soon as possible. Diseases of shrimp viruses and white fishes use calcium carbonate, fertilizer, and potash alum as preventative measures. The farmer converted their agricultural land into gher for fish/shrimp cultivation. The community stored/harvested rainwater in a plastic pot or soil pot. The study results will help the government with landscape planning and a disaster-prevention plan at the local level
Understanding where people depend the most on natural resources for their basic human needs is crucial for planning conservation and development interventions. For some people, nature is a direct source of food, clean water, and energy through subsistence uses. However, a high direct dependency on nature for basic needs makes people particularly sensitive to changes in climate, land cover, and land tenure. Based on more than 5 million household interviews conducted in 85 tropical countries, we identified where people highly depend on nature for their basic needs. Our results show that 1.2 billion people, or 30% of the population across tropical countries, are highly dependent on nature. In places where people highly depend on nature for their basic needs, nature-based strategies that protect, restore or sustainably manage ecosystems must be carefully designed to promote inclusive human development alongside environmental benefits.
Alongside the steep reductions needed in fossil fuel emissions, natural climate solutions (NCS) represent readily deployable options that can contribute to Canada’s goals for emission reductions. We estimate the mitigation potential of 24 NCS related to the protection, management, and restoration of natural systems that can also deliver numerous co-benefits, such as enhanced soil productivity, clean air and water, and biodiversity conservation. NCS can provide up to 78.2 (41.0 to 115.1) Tg CO2e/year (95% CI) of mitigation annually in 2030 and 394.4 (173.2 to 612.4) Tg CO2e cumulatively between 2021 and 2030, with 34% available at ≤CAD 50/Mg CO2e. Avoided conversion of grassland, avoided peatland disturbance, cover crops, and improved forest management offer the largest mitigation opportunities. The mitigation identified here represents an important potential contribution to the Paris Agreement, such that NCS combined with existing mitigation plans could help Canada to meet or exceed its climate goals.
Minimising the environmental impacts of biofuel production is an urgent global challenge. Over the next decade, increased demand for sugarcane-based ethanol in Brazil could result in over one million hectares of the nation’s native forest and grassland being replaced directly by sugarcane or indirectly by displaced crops and pastureland. Here we integrate future ethanol demand scenarios in Brazil within a spatially-explicit planning framework aimed at minimising impacts of ethanol-driven agricultural expansion on aboveground carbon stocks and 453 species of immediate conservation concern. We show that ethanol-driven agricultural expansion that is blind to carbon and biodiversity values would release 44.9 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2eq), and would impact habitat for at least 273 species. When compared to this conservation-blind scenario, agricultural expansion that avoids carbon and biodiversity values would reduce emissions by 87% (5.8 MtCO2eq) and would avoid impacts on habitat for 113 species. These findings are immediately relevant to policy makers seeking to guide ethanol-driven land-use change away from important environmental areas in Brazil. Our planning methodology can also be extended to other natural areas at risk of bioenergy-driven agricultural expansion.
Afforestation plays an important role in soil carbon storage and water balance. However, there is a lack of information on deep soil carbon and water storage. The study investigates the effect of returning farmland to the forest on soil carbon accumulation and soil water consumption in 20-m deep soil profile in the hilly and gully region of the Chinese Loess Plateau. Four sampling sites were selected: Platycladus orientalis (Linn.) Franco forest (PO: oriental arborvitae), Pinus tabulaeformis Carr. Forest (PT: southern Chinese pine), apple orchard (AO) and farmland (FL, as a control). Soil organic carbon (SOC) and soil inorganic carbon (SIC) content were measured in 50-cm sampling intervals of 20-m soil profiles, as well as the associated factors (e.g. soil water content). The mean SOC content of PT was the highest in the 1–5 m layer and that of FL was the lowest (p < 0.05). Compared with FL, the SOC storages of PO, PT and AO increased by 2.20, 6.33 and 0.90 kg m−2 (p > 0.05), respectively, in the whole profile. The SIC content was relatively uniform throughout the profile at all land-use types and SIC storage was 9–10 times higher than SOC storage. The soil water storage of PO, PT and AO was significantly different from that of FL with a decrease of 1169.32, 1161.60 and 1139.63 mm, respectively. After the 36-yrs implementation of the “Grain for Green” Project, SOC in 20 m soil profiles increased as a water depletion cost compared with FL. Further investigation is still needed to understand the deep soil water and carbon interactions regarding ecological restoration sustainability in the Northern Loess Plateau.
Terrestrial ecosystems remove about 30 per cent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by human activities each year1, yet the persistence of this carbon sink depends partly on how plant biomass and soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks respond to future increases in atmospheric CO2 (refs. 2,3). Although plant biomass often increases in elevated CO2 (eCO2) experiments4,5,6, SOC has been observed to increase, remain unchanged or even decline7. The mechanisms that drive this variation across experiments remain poorly understood, creating uncertainty in climate projections8,9. Here we synthesized data from 108 eCO2 experiments and found that the effect of eCO2 on SOC stocks is best explained by a negative relationship with plant biomass: when plant biomass is strongly stimulated by eCO2, SOC storage declines; conversely, when biomass is weakly stimulated, SOC storage increases. This trade-off appears to be related to plant nutrient acquisition, in which plants increase their biomass by mining the soil for nutrients, which decreases SOC storage. We found that, overall, SOC stocks increase with eCO2 in grasslands (8 ± 2 per cent) but not in forests (0 ± 2 per cent), even though plant biomass in grasslands increase less (9 ± 3 per cent) than in forests (23 ± 2 per cent). Ecosystem models do not reproduce this trade-off, which implies that projections of SOC may need to be revised.
