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Global trends of cropland phosphorus use and sustainability challenges

Nature volume 611, pages 81–87 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

To meet the growing food demand while addressing the multiple challenges of exacerbating phosphorus (P) pollution and depleting P rock reserves1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15, P use efficiency (PUE, the ratio of productive P output to P input in a defined system) in crop production needs to be improved. Although many efforts have been devoted to improving nutrient management practices on farms, few studies have examined the historical trajectories of PUE and their socioeconomic and agronomic drivers on a national scale1,2,6,7,11,16,17. Here we present a database of the P budget (the input and output of the crop production system) and PUE by country and by crop type for 1961–2019, and examine the substantial contribution of several drivers for PUE, such as economic development stages and crop portfolios. To address the P management challenges, we found that global PUE in crop production must increase to 68–81%, and recent trends indicate some meaningful progress towards this goal. However, P management challenges and opportunities in croplands vary widely among countries.

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Fig. 1: Illustration of the main cropland P budget terms used in this study.
Fig. 2: Historical P budget and PUE trends from 1961 to 2019.
Fig. 3: The relationships between income level and P surplus and between income level and PUE.
Fig. 4: PUE by crop group.
Fig. 5: P surplus rate by country.
Fig. 6: P surplus and P scarcity in 2010 and in 2050 under various scenarios.

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Data availability

All data are available in the article and its Supplementary information. Other raw data supporting the findings of this study are available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.573n5tb74. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code used to perform analyses in this study was generated in MATLAB R2020b. Figures were created in Microsoft PowerPoint software, R 4.2.0, MATLAB R2020b, Adobe Acrobat Pro 2022.001.20169 and ArcGIS 10.8.1 (https://www.esri.com/). Maps in Supplementary Information were generated in Tableau 2020.2 using free map data from OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright). The MATLAB code needed to generate the results presented in the paper is available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.573n5tb74. Additional code is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the OCP Research LLC for providing financial support and suggestions; F. Knorre for providing the code for the cointegration test, the non-cointegration test and the extended fully modified ordinary least squares estimator adapted for the cointegrating polynomial regression; D. Liang and V. Lyubchich for providing suggestions on statistical analyses; A. J. Elmore and K. Jackson for providing suggestions on map copyright; and K. Jackson for generating the main-text maps in ArcGIS. X.Z. is supported by the National Science Foundation (CNS-1739823, CBET-2047165, and CBET-2025826) and the Belmont Forum.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Appalachian Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Frostburg, MD, USA

    T. Zou, X. Zhang & E. A. Davidson

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Contributions

X.Z. and T.Z. conceptualized the study. T.Z. coded the numerical analyses and analysed the data based on X.Z.’s previous work and suggestions from X.Z. and E.A.D. T.Z. wrote the paper. T.Z., X.Z. and E.A.D. edited the paper.

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Correspondence to X. Zhang.

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Nature thanks Martin Meleberg, Thomas Nesme and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Table 1 P budget and PUE aggregated to 12 regions/countries and 11 crop groups in 2010 (averaged between 2008–2012) and projected for 2050 under three scenarios
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Scenarios developed for projecting P surplus and P input in 2050
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Notes 1–7, Figs. 1–14, Tables 1–32 and References.

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Supplementary Data 1

Phosphorus contents and ranges (minima and maxima in the literature) used in this study.

Supplementary Data 2

Phosphorus content ranges (minima and maxima), means and standard deviations used in the sensitivity test.

Supplementary Data 3

Phosphorus use efficiency (PUE) data used for scenario analysis (global 50th and 75th percentiles).

Source data

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Zou, T., Zhang, X. & Davidson, E.A. Global trends of cropland phosphorus use and sustainability challenges. Nature 611, 81–87 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05220-z

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