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Telecoupled impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war on global cropland expansion and biodiversity

Nature Sustainability volume 7, pages 432–441 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Russia–Ukraine War is impacting global food systems, which may trigger global cropland expansion and consequently lead to biodiversity loss far from war zones. To quantify such impacts on biodiversity, we simulated the global cropland expansion provoked by the reshaping of international virtual cropland flows under different war scenarios and conducted a biodiversity impact assessment. The results indicate that, in the baseline situation (33.57% reduction in Ukraine’s exports), the war would result in an additional 8.48 Mha of cropland expansion compared with the ‘no war’ scenario. This cropland expansion would impact biodiversity most in countries such as the United States, Spain, France, India and Brazil. The cessation of Russia’s participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative would lead to a doubling of cropland expansion and biodiversity loss compared with the baseline situation. If the conflict deteriorates further, that is, no exports from Russia and Ukraine, cropland expansion and biodiversity loss would increase by up to 2.9 and ∼4.5 times, respectively. These findings highlight the need for proactive measures to mitigate the impact of this war on biodiversity and suggest that actions to implement the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework should take into account the potential impacts of conflicts on biodiversity.

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Fig. 1: Mechanism diagram.
Fig. 2: Impacts of the war on international virtual cropland flows.
Fig. 3: Global cropland expansion triggered by the Russia–Ukraine war.
Fig. 4: Global biodiversity loss induced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Data availability

The GTAP Database is available at https://www.gtap.agecon.purdue.edu/databases/. The Multi-Regional Input-Output database adopted to investigate virtual agricultural land flows can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3993659. The datasets of characterization factors adopted to calculate the biodiversity loss due to land transformation are available free of charge in the supporting information of the previous study at https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5b02507.

Code availability

All data processing and analysis were conducted in ArcGIS (v.10.7), MATLAB (v.2021), GTAP (v.10) and Microsoft Excel (v.2016). The code and model output files are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10546479.

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Acknowledgements

L.C. acknowledges support from the National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFD1500205). J.L. acknowledges support from the US National Science Foundation (1924111 and 2118329), the USDA NIFA (2023-68012-39076) and Michigan AgBioResearch. We thank S. Nichols for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. International College Beijing, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

    Li Chai

  2. College of Economics and Management, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

    Li Chai & Ao Liu

  3. National Innovation Center for Digital Fishery, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

    Li Chai

  4. College of Land Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

    Xuecao Li, Wanru He & Jianxi Huang

  5. The School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Zhenshan Guo

  6. School of Information Engineering, Tarim University, Alaer, China

    Tiecheng Bai

  7. Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Jianguo Liu

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Contributions

L.C. and J.L. conceptualized the project; L.C., X.L. and A.L. designed the methodology; L.C. and A.L. undertook formal analyses; L.C., X.L., A.L. and W.H. performed the investigations; L.C. and J.L. supervised the work; J.H. and T.B. validated the results; L.C., A.L., X.L. and W.H. visualized the data; L.C. wrote the first draft; J.L. and Z.G. contributed to the review and editing of the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Li Chai or Jianguo Liu.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Damià Barceló, Peter Alexander, Nathalie J. Lambrecht and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–9 and Tables 1–5.

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Supplementary Data

Food price changes and food consumption changes under different scenarios.

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Chai, L., Liu, A., Li, X. et al. Telecoupled impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war on global cropland expansion and biodiversity. Nat Sustain 7, 432–441 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01292-z

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