Take it from the top: Global-scale constraints on our food system and agricultural sustainability challenges

Background/Question/Methods

Increasing human populations, economic activity, and resource consumption are placing unprecedented demands on agriculture and natural resources. Today, approximately a billion people are chronically malnourished while our agricultural systems are concurrently degrading land, water, biodiversity and climate on a global scale. To meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs, food production must grow substantially, by approximately 70-100%, while at the same time, agriculture’s environmental footprint must shrink dramatically, especially in terms of CO2 emissions, water consumption, nutrient pollution and biodiversity decline.  Here we analyse solutions to this dilemma at the global scale, looking at global patterns of food : environment tradeoffs, and in particular examine opportunities to find strategic "leverage points" on the global scale to improve food security and reduce environmental harms from agriculture.

Results/Conclusions

Our global-scale analyses show that tremendous progress could be made to improving food security and environmental sustainability by halting agricultural expansion (especially into rainforests), closing ‘yield gaps’ on underperforming lands, increasing cropping efficiency, shifting diets and biofuel consumption, and reducing global food waste. Together, these strategies could roughly double food production while greatly reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture, perhaps by as much as 50-100% declines in deforestation, unsustainable water consumption and nutrient pollution.  We further show that there are several "hot spots" in global agriculture, where relatively small investments could have profound impacts on the global environment.