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Effects of profit-driven cropland expansion and conservation policies

Nature Sustainability (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Biodiversity protection and climate change mitigation require understanding of the potential trade-offs from possible future cropland expansion. Here we apply an interdisciplinary coupled modelling approach to identify areas under the globally highest expansion pressure of 1% to 30% future cropland expansion by 2030. On the basis of recent projections, we analyse the potential impacts on agricultural markets, biodiversity and CO2 land-use emissions of a 3.6% global cropland expansion scenario by 2030. We assess how global conservation policies could shift expansion pressure and alter the ensuing impacts. Our results confirm that the areas under pressure are located mainly in the tropics. A cropland expansion of 3.6% increases global agricultural production by 2%. The associated land-use change generates 17.1 Gt CO2 emissions and leads to a further decline in biodiversity intactness of 26% in the expanded areas. Conservation policies prohibiting the expansion into forests, wetlands and existing protected areas could substantially reduce emissions from land-use change, maintaining global agricultural productivity, but might have contrary effects on biodiversity. Strategic land-use planning could help reconcile agricultural production with environmental protection. The map of areas under expansion pressure presented here could contribute to improving the spatial planning of conservation measures.

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Fig. 1: Areas under expansion pressure up to a potential increase in current cropland of 30% without conservation policies.
Fig. 2: Areas under expansion pressure in the 3.6% EXP scenario.
Fig. 3: Economic impacts of converting the areas under expansion pressure into cropland until 2030 in the 3.6% EXP scenario vs the REF scenario.
Fig. 4: CO2 emissions generated by converting the areas under expansion pressure into cropland in the 3.6% EXP scenario.
Fig. 5: Regional impacts of the transformation of the areas under expansion pressure into cropland on biodiversity in the 3.6% EXP scenario.
Fig. 6: Changes in the spatial patterns of expansion pressure and the socio-economic and environmental impacts under the implementation of conservation policies.

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Data availability

The created data on the areas under expansion pressure and the profitability ranking of these areas for both scenarios, EXP scenario and CON scenario, at 0.5° spatial resolution and aggregated at country level are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12505548 (ref. 105).

The data were analysed using MATLAB and R.

Code availability

The codes to assess the areas under the highest pressure for cropland expansion, to evaluate the land-use change induced CO2 emissions and to investigate the impacts on biodiversity intactness are available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Pongratz for providing the data on PNV for the analysis of land-use change related carbon emissions. This project was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (grant 031B0230A/031B0230B and grant 031B0788A/031B0788B).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany

    Julia M. Schneider, Wolfram Mauser & Florian Zabel

  2. Department for Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Ruth Delzeit & Florian Zabel

  3. Department Computational Landscape Ecology, Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany

    Christian Neumann & Ralf Seppelt

  4. Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Kiel, Germany

    Tobias Heimann

  5. Institute of Geoscience and Geography, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Ralf Seppelt

  6. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

    Ralf Seppelt

  7. Chair of Bioeconomy and Computational Science Hub, Institute of Economics, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany

    Franziska Schuenemann

  8. Coordination Unit Climate, Soil, Biodiversity, Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute, Braunschweig, Germany

    Mareike Söder

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Contributions

J.M.S., R.D. and F.Z. conceived the study. J.M.S., F.Z., R.D., T.H., C.N. and R.S. conceptualized the research design. J.M.S. and F.Z. conducted the PROMET simulations, the CO2 emission analysis and prepared the land-use input data for the biodiversity intactness analysis. R.D., T.H., F.S. and M.S. prepared the database for the DART-BIO simulations. R.D. and T.H. conducted the DART-BIO simulations. C.N. and R.S. conducted the biodiversity intactness analysis. J.M.S., R.D., T.H. and F.Z. conducted the model coupling between DART-BIO and PROMET with the iLANCE model. J.M.S. prepared the first draft of the manuscript. J.M.S., R.D., F.Z., T.H., F.S., M.S., C.N., R.S. and W.M. discussed the results and contributed to the paper and its revision.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Julia M. Schneider or Florian Zabel.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Patrick von Jeetze, Eduardo Zegarra, Arthur Bragança and Hossein Azadi for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Overview of the scenario design.

To evaluate the economic impact of cropland expansion on prices, production and trade patterns, the expansion scenario (EXP) is compared to a reference scenario without cropland expansion (REF) until 2030. The impacts of conservation policies are assessed by comparing two identical future expansion scenarios that only differ in the presence (CON scenario) or absence (EXP scenario) of conservation policies protecting forests, wetlands and already protected areas from a conversion into cropland. A detailed description on the scenario design is provided in the Methods section.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Overview of the applied research framework.

a) displays the developed expansion module in iLANCE and the various inputs from the biophysical and economic model as well as land-use information. (b) locates the expansion module in the integrative coupling framework of the land-use model iLANCE and provides a wider context of the model structure.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Region mapping for the analysis of the results.

a) Region mapping of the 21 economic study regions: AFR (Sub-Saharan Africa), ANZ (Australia, New Zealand and Oceania), BRA (Brazil), CAN (Canada), CEU (Central Europe), CHN (China), DEU (Germany), EAS (Eastern Asia), FSU (Rest of Former Soviet Union), IND (India), LAM (Rest of Latin America), MAI (Malaysia and Indonesia), MEA (Middle East and Northern Africa), MED (Mediterranean), MEE (Middle Eastern Europe), NWE (North Western Europe), PAC (Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay), RNE (Rest of Northern Europe), ROA (Rest of Asia), RUS (Russia), USA (United States of America). (b) Region mapping of the 6 aggregated ‚world regions‘: Africa, Australia & Oceania, Asia & Russia, Europe, North America and South America. The region borders of both maps show the aggregated country borders according to the global administrative areas of GADM version 3.6. (https://gadm.org/).

Extended Data Fig. 4 Area under expansion pressure.

Area under expansion pressure per pixel [km2] under a global cropland expansion of 30%. The grey areas display the current cropland distribution [km²].

Extended Data Fig. 5 Expansion pressure at the frontiers of current cropland.

Cumulative share of the regionally most profitable expansion area [%] under the 3.6% EXP scenario located at pixels with shares from 0% to 100% currently covered with cropland exemplarily for the four regions Sub-Saharan Africa (AFR), Brazil (BRA), China (CHN) and Paraguay, Argentina, Chile & Uruguay (PAC).

Extended Data Fig. 6 Regional expansion pressure under 30% cropland increase.

Regional distribution of the identified profitable area for cropland expansion [million km²] under an increase in current cropland by 30% without conservation policies, and the relative changes [%] under the introduction of conservation policies for each world region.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Regional expansion pressure under 3.6% cropland increase.

Regional distribution of the identified profitable area for cropland expansion [million km²] under an increase in current cropland by 3.6% without conservation policies, and the relative changes [%] under the introduction of conservation policies for each world region.

Extended Data Table 1 Overview of the considered crops and crop categories
Full size table

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Supplementary Notes 1–4, Figs. 1–24, and Tables 1 and 2.

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Schneider, J.M., Delzeit, R., Neumann, C. et al. Effects of profit-driven cropland expansion and conservation policies. Nat Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01410-x

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