Global Land Use Implications of Dietary Trends

Global food security and agricultural land management represent two urgent and intimately related challenges that humans must face. We quantify the changes in the global agricultural land footprint if the world were to adhere to the dietary guidelines put forth by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), while accounting for the land use change incurred by import/export required to meet those guidelines. We analyze data at country, continental, and global levels. USDA guidelines are viewed as an improvement on the current land-intensive diet of the average American, but despite this our results show that global adherence to the guidelines would require 1 gigahectare of additional land—roughly the size of Canada—under current agricultural practice. The results also show a strong divide between Eastern and Western hemispheres, with many Western hemisphere countries showing net land sparing under a USDA guideline diet, while many Eastern hemisphere countries show net land use increase under a USDA guideline diet. We conclude that national dietary guidelines should be developed using not just health but also global land use and equity as criteria. Because global lands are a limited resource, national dietary guidelines also need to be coordinated internationally, in much the same way greenhouse gas emissions are increasingly coordinated

Two Generations of CubeSat Missions (CSSWE and CIRBE) to Take on the Challenges of Measuring Relativistic Electrons in the Earth’s Magnetosphere

The Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE) CubeSat, carrying the Relativistic Electron and Proton Telescope integrated little experiment (REPTile) to measure 0.5 to \u3e3.8 MeV electrons and 8-40 MeV protons, operated for over two years, 2012-2014, in low Earth orbit (LEO). There have been 25 peer-reviewed publications, including two in Nature, and five Ph.D. dissertations associated with CSSWE. Another 3U CubeSat mission: Colorado Inner Radiation Belt Electron Experiment (CIRBE), has been under development to address an unresolved science question: Where is the break point in terms of electron energy below which electrons can be transported into the inner belt from the outer belt but above which they cannot? This requires clean measurements of energetic electrons with fine energy resolution in an environment where all instruments are subject to the unforgiving penetration from highly energetic protons (tens of MeV to GeV). An advanced version of REPTile has been designed and built, REPTile-2. It has been integrated into the CIRBE bus, which has active attitude control, deployable solar panels, and a S-band radio, provided by Blue Canyon Technologies. CIRBE advances our science capabilities and has significantly improved performance vs. CSSWE and is ready to be launched into a LEO in early 2023

Correction: Global land use implications of dietary trends.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200781.]

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Global food security and agricultural land management represent two urgent and intimately related challenges that humans must face. We quantify the changes in the global agricultural land footprint if the world were to adhere to the dietary guidelines put forth by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), while accounting for the land use change incurred by import/export required to meet those guidelines. We analyze data at country, continental, and global levels. USDA guidelines are viewed as an improvement on the current land-intensive diet of the average American, but despite this our results show that global adherence to the guidelines would require 1 gigahectare of additional land—roughly the size of Canada—under current agricultural practice. The results also show a strong divide between Eastern and Western hemispheres, with many Western hemisphere countries showing net land sparing under a USDA guideline diet, while many Eastern hemisphere countries show net land use increase under a USDA guideline diet. We conclude that national dietary guidelines should be developed using not just health but also global land use and equity as criteria. Because global lands are a limited resource, national dietary guidelines also need to be coordinated internationally, in much the same way greenhouse gas emissions are increasingly coordinated.NSERC Discovery Grant || University of Guelph’s Food from Thought Initiative, funded through the Canada First Research Excellent Fun

There is not enough land in the world to allow everyone to eat a USDA guideline diet.

<p>Plot shows net amount of land spared (or required) to meet the USDA <i>Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010</i>, by year for (a) all food groups, and for (b) oils, (c) grains, (d) meat and pulses, (e) vegetables, (f) fruits, (g) dairy, and (h) discretional. Red depicts the amount of land spared or required based only on domestic production while the blue line combines domestic land and displaced land (land use a country generates elsewhere by relying on food imports) to depict a total amount of land spared (or required). A net positive value for land spared means less land would be required under a change to a USDA guideline diet, while a net negative value means more land would be required to meet the guidelines (a “land deficit”). The gap between domestic and total land spared for all groups is nonzero due to discrepancies in the FAO dataset; the two curves should match one another.</p

Daily recommended caloric intake of each food group as outlined by the United States Department of Agriculture Food Guide.

<p>Table adapted from the USDA <i>Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010</i> [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0200781#pone.0200781.ref007" target="_blank">7</a>]. Food groups are divided into 6 categories with servings determined by caloric levels. The caloric levels are assigned based on sex, physiological status and age.</p

A western/eastern hemispheric divide in land spared versus land required by a USDA guideline diet.

<p>Land spared or required in 2010 by country, in millions of hectares (MHa). According to the scale, countries that would reduce global land use by changing to a USDA guideline diet (net positive land spared) are indicated in blue and teal, while countries that would require extra land to meet the guidelines (net negative land spared) are indicated in red, yellow or green. The map was created by the authors from FAOSTAT data using the Google Maps API (<a href="https://developers.google.com/maps/" target="_blank">https://developers.google.com/maps/</a> with Apache License Version 2.0) [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0200781#pone.0200781.ref017" target="_blank">17</a>].</p