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Assessing the risks associated with new agricultural practices

Abstract

One key challenge for the twenty-first century is how to produce the food we need, yet ensure the landscape we want. Genetically modified crops have focused our attention on how to answer this question for one part of agriculture. The same principles could be applied to assess environmental impacts of future land-use change in a much broader context.

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Figure 1: Land use by agriculture and other uses.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to J. Perry, A. Gray, A. Lilley, P. Dale and L. Firbank for helpful comments and discussion.

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Correspondence to R. S. Hails.

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Hails, R. Assessing the risks associated with new agricultural practices. Nature 418, 685–688 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01016

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