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China’s future food demand and its implications for trade and environment

Nature Sustainability volume 4, pages 1042–1051 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Satisfying China’s food demand without harming the environment is one of the greatest sustainability challenges for the coming decades. Here we provide a comprehensive forward-looking assessment of the environmental impacts of China’s growing demand on the country itself and on its trading partners. We find that the increasing food demand, especially for livestock products (~16%–30% across all scenarios), would domestically require ~3–12 Mha of additional pasture between 2020 and 2050, resulting in ~−2% to +16% growth in agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The projected ~15%–24% reliance on agricultural imports in 2050 would result in ~90–175 Mha of agricultural land area and ~88–226 MtCO2-equivalent yr−1of GHG emissions virtually imported to China, which account for ~26%–46% and ~13%–32% of China’s global environmental impacts, respectively. The distribution of the environmental impacts between China and the rest of the world would substantially depend on development of trade openness. Thus, to limit the negative environmental impacts of its growing food consumption, besides domestic policies, China needs to also take responsibility in the development of sustainable international trade.

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Fig. 1: Trends in demand, production and trade of agricultural products in China.
Fig. 2: Domestic versus virtually imported changes of environmental impacts.
Fig. 3: Environmental impacts on exporting regions.
Fig. 4: Comparison of the global environmental impacts of China’s food demand under different scenarios by 2050.

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Data availability

The main data supporting the results of this study can be found in the Supplementary Information, and other relevant data are available in the IIASA DARE repository (https://dare.iiasa.ac.at/126/). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code used to present the results in this study is available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)—A. Mosnier, J. Poncet and G. Schmidt-Traub—who initiated this project in the context of FABLE, accompanied it throughout its duration and provided many valuable comments. L.M. acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC (31972517); the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS (2019101); Key Laboratory of Agricultural Water Resources, CAS (ZD201802); the Outstanding Young Scientists Project of Natural Science Foundation of Hebei (C2019503054). This research has also received funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Norwegian International Climate and Forest Initiative and World Resources Institute. Finally, H.Z. acknowledges IIASA’s Young Scientists Summer Program for providing collaboration opportunities.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Agricultural Water Resources, Hebei Key Laboratory of Soil Ecology, Center for Agricultural Resources Research, Institute of Genetic and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shijiazhuang, China

    Hao Zhao, Lin Ma & Zhaohai Bai

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shijingshan District, Beijing, China

    Hao Zhao

  3. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

    Hao Zhao, Jinfeng Chang, Petr Havlík, Michiel van Dijk, Hugo Valin, Charlotte Janssens & Michael Obersteiner

  4. College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Jinfeng Chang

  5. Wageningen Economic Research, Wageningen University and Research, The Hague, the Netherlands

    Michiel van Dijk

  6. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Heverlee, Belgium

    Charlotte Janssens

  7. Department of Global Development, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences & Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Mario Herrero

  8. Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    Pete Smith

  9. Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

    Michael Obersteiner

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  1. Hao Zhao
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  2. Jinfeng Chang
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  3. Petr Havlík
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Contributions

H.Z., P.H. and L.M. designed the study. H.Z., J.C., P.H., M.v.D. and H.V. contributed the data analysis. H.Z., J.C. and P.H. wrote the manuscript with contributions from H.V. and C.J. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Petr Havlík or Lin Ma.

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Peer review Information Nature Sustainability thanks Guolin Yao and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Discussion, Tables 1–7 and Figs. 1–18.

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Zhao, H., Chang, J., Havlík, P. et al. China’s future food demand and its implications for trade and environment. Nat Sustain 4, 1042–1051 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00784-6

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