Land use is one of the best tools we have to lock away tons of carbon dioxide and achieve our climate goals. But it’s also crucial for growing food. Can these two future demands co-exist?
Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is yes, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Environmental Science. The research finds that it is possible to increase food production, protect habitats, lock away tons and tons of carbon, and expand renewable energy production to keep warming below 1.5 °C — all of that, without any of these land-based changes infringing on each other’s space.
However, the researchers say that this game of tetris will require enormous, bold changes, including global policies and incentives to both protect land and limit competition between these different needs.
To make their findings the researchers relied on a future climate projection called Sky 2050, a scenario developed by oil-giant Shell that shows the raft of changes that would be needed in order to keep temperature increases to below 1.5 °C by 2100. Sky 2050 shows that a huge piece in this puzzle will be to rely on the undeveloped land across the planet to capture carbon and produce clean energy — which would mean expanding solar and wind farms across this territory, capturing huge amounts of carbon in soils and habitats through nature-based solutions like reforestation and soil protection, and some amount of carbon capture and storage.
This left the researchers curious to find out if all this would leave enough land to nourish the planet.
To find out, they plugged the Sky 2050 scenario data into a model developed by MIT called the Integrated Global System Modeling, which reveals a picture of what the world would look like physically and socio-economically under different scenarios.
You might expect that under the demands of the Sky 2050 vision, carbon storage, farming, and habits would be left jostling for space on Earth’s oversubscribed terrain. Instead the model revealed that even the biggest changes required to meet the climate target (nature-based solutions, which require by far the largest areas of land) wouldn’t encroach on food production.
Interestingly, that’s partly because those nature-based solutions would overlap with it, transforming farming into a more nature-friendly enterprise overall, and in turn making it a critical part of the climate solution. In fact, by 2100 according to the model, 61% of global cropland would also play host to some kind of nature-based solution. One standout example was biochar, which provided the largest carbon sequestration from a single nature-based solution in farming, the researchers found. Other examples are conservation tillage, planting nitrogen-fixing legumes, and agroforestry.
To meet climate targets, a greater area of carbon-sequestering forests would need to be protected, and forests would need to be expanded through reforestation schemes, as well. According to the model, that would also be possible with the available land.
What happens to food in this picture? The researchers find that farming would be unaffected by all this firstly because it would share the space with nature-based solutions in many instances, and according to modeling that would not impact yields. In fact, many of these climate solutions, like biochar, have been connected to increases in yield. But as well as this, the model suggests that cropland would also be able to expand into former pasture land that will decline in spread, because market pressures which would apply higher costs to the production of high-emissions food under the idealized Sky 2050 scenario, which would drive down livestock production, and also make it more land-efficient.
Overall, even with these carbon and biodiversity gains, crop production would be able to increase in line with food demand, rising by 161% per person between 2020 and 2100.
As for renewable energies and bioenergy, the researchers found that intensification of solar and wind farms would require between 3 to 5% of global land, and that would not encroach on habitat or farms.
Overall, the researchers’ model of the Sky 2050 scenario shows that nature-based solutions in particular lock away or remove up to 6 gigatons of CO2 per year. That, in combination with the carbon benefits of the other land uses, would bring the world in line to reach its climate targets by century’s end.
Balancing this with food production—while possible—still reveals a huge gap between where we are and where we want to be. That’s a fact that the researchers recognise with some suggestions for sweeping reforms that would need to take place. Chief among these is that nature-based solutions would need to be “massively adopted” by farmers, the researchers say, and ideally fast—by 2050. That will likely require rafts of government incentives to bring farmers on board. National and global policies that support different land uses would also need to be carefully aligned to make sure that activities don’t compete.
The researchers are clear that they don’t have the answers to how to accomplish this enormous feat: those are details to be explored in future research. The goal of this research is to upend the idea that we need to protect either nature, climate, or food. “The novelty of our study is in providing a clear message that it is possible to fit the land for major human needs, while protecting and restoring land,” they write.
Paltsev et. al. “Land-use competition in 1.5°C climate stabilization: is there enough land for all potential needs?” Frontiers in Environmental Science. 2024.
Image: Goodfon.com
