Reducing agriculture's environmental impacts through diverse producers

The world food system is characterised by millions of diverse producers yet approaches to increase productivity and environmental sustainability that are effective in light of this remain underexplored. Here I present data revealing that the environmental impacts and productivity of different producers are highly variable. I then present evidence that an effective approach to improve outcomes given this heterogeneity would require environmental and productivity monitoring by each producer and communication of this information up supply chains and through to consumers. With colleagues, I develop an environmental science toolkit to enable producers to monitor their environmental impacts and a filetype to represent agri-environmental data which would support producers to communicate their impacts. I then explore how an environmental impact labelling scheme could trigger the creation of this measurement and communication system while also incentivising substantial behavioural change. Overall, this thesis develops, and then starts delivering on, a sustainability and productivity solution for agriculture

Proactive conservation to prevent habitat losses to agricultural expansion

The projected loss of millions of square kilometres of natural ecosystems to meet future demand for food, animal feed, fibre and bioenergy crops is likely to massively escalate threats to biodiversity. Reducing these threats requires a detailed knowledge of how and where they are likely to be most severe. We developed a geographically explicit model of future agricultural land clearance based on observed historical changes, and combined the outputs with species-specific habitat preferences for 19,859 species of terrestrial vertebrates. We project that 87.7% of these species will lose habitat to agricultural expansion by 2050, with 1,280 species projected to lose ≥25% of their habitat. Proactive policies targeting how, where, and what food is produced could reduce these threats, with a combination of approaches potentially preventing almost all these losses while contributing to healthier human diets. As international biodiversity targets are set to be updated in 2021, these results highlight the importance of proactive efforts to safeguard biodiversity by reducing demand for agricultural land