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Smart land-use planning could ease the conflict between agricultural production and nature conservation. A team of researchers from the University of Göttingen, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and the University of Münster integrated global datasets on the geographical distributions and ecological requirements of thousands of animal species with detailed information on the production of the world’s major agricultural crops. The results were published in Global Change Biology.
Increasing agricultural production usually leads to various negative side effects in agricultural landscapes, such as local decline in wildlife and loss of ecosystem functions. But what would happen if agricultural growth would be focused on areas of the world where only a few animal species would be affected?
The researchers evaluated how far global biodiversity loss could be minimized by such planning. They found that 88 percent of the biodiversity that is expected to be lost under future agricultural intensification could be avoided if global land use was spatially optimized.
“However, global optimization implies that species-rich countries, mainly in the tropics, would be more responsible for safeguarding the world’s natural resources – at the expense of their own production opportunities and economic development,” says lead author Lukas Egli of Göttingen University and UFZ.
This applies mainly to countries that are highly dependent on agriculture. “Unless such conflicting national interests can be somehow accommodated in international sustainability policies, global cooperation seems unlikely and might generate new socioeconomic dependencies.”
Lukas Egli et al. Winners and losers of national and global efforts to reconcile agricultural intensification and biodiversity conservation. Global Change Biology 2018. Doi: 10.1111/gcb.14076.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday March 11 2018, @07:13PM (3 children)
a global entity safeguarding biodiversity would be a good thing, if people only didn't use it as a bureaucrat jobs supply for their friends, as a way to submit little producers by pushing a new set of mostly nonsensically structured regulations, and more nefarious purposes.
hows the banana curvature law going?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday March 11 2018, @08:04PM (2 children)
Safeguarding biodiversity, with no actual use of that diversity, is kind of a fools errand.
Why wait till some imagined dooms day to trot out the old seeds. In many cases you will be years away from a crop, when you are digging through that frozen Norwegian seed bank.
Plant that stuff, and make a market in it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday March 11 2018, @10:49PM
I am not sure what you mean by that. Surely you are not suggesting that there is no point to anything not immediately profitable to humans?
However, making a market for things can help sometimes. The Chatham Islands Forget-me-not [wikipedia.org] was nearly extinct at one point, eaten by cattle and sheep in it's only island habitat, but it is a pretty flowering plant, quite hardy in salty coastal environments, so garden shops started selling it as an ornamental, and it is now widely planted and successful.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday March 12 2018, @06:16PM
Safeguarding biodiversity, with no actual use of that diversity, is kind of a fools errand.
What're you, an Irish potato farmer from 1845?