How much multilateralism do we need? Effectiveness of unilateral agricultural mitigation efforts in the global context

Achieving climate neutrality in the European Union (EU) by 2050 will require substantial efforts across all economic sectors, including agriculture. At the same time, an ambitious unilateral EU agricultural mitigation policy is likely to have adverse effects on the sector and may have limited efficiency at global scale due to emission leakage to non-EU regions. To analyse the competitiveness of the EU's agricultural sector and potential non-CO2 emission leakage conditional on mitigation efforts outside the EU, we apply three economic agricultural sector models. We find that an ambitious unilateral EU mitigation policy in line with efforts needed to achieve the 1.5 °C target globally strongly affects EU ruminant production and trade balance. However, since EU farmers rank among the most greenhouse gas efficient producers worldwide, if the rest of the world were to start pursuing agricultural mitigation efforts too, economic impacts of an ambitious domestic mitigation policy get buffered and EU livestock producers could even start to benefit from a globally coordinated mitigation policy

Experiments in Globalisation, Food Security and Land Use Decision Making

The globalisation of trade affects land use, food production and environmentsaround the world. In principle, globalisation can maximise productivity andefficiency if competition prompts specialisation on the basis of productive capacity.In reality, however, such specialisation is often constrained by practical or politicalbarriers, including those intended to ensure national or regional food security.These are likely to produce globally sub-optimal distributions of land uses. Bothoutcomes are subject to the responses of individual land managers to economicand environmental stimuli, and these responses are known to be variable and often(economically) irrational. We investigate the consequences of stylised food securitypolicies and globalisation of agricultural markets on land use patterns under avariety of modelled forms of land manager behaviour, including variation inproduction levels, tenacity, land use intensity and multi-functionality. We find that asystem entirely dedicated to regional food security is inferior to an entirelyglobalised system in terms of overall production levels, but that several forms ofbehaviour limit the difference between the two, and that variations in land useintensity and functionality can substantially increase the provision of food and otherecosystem services in both cases. We also find emergent behaviour that results inthe abandonment of productive land, the slowing of rates of land use change andthe fragmentation or, conversely, concentration of land uses following changes indemand levels

Bending the curve of terrestrial biodiversity needs an integrated strategy

Increased efforts are required to prevent further losses to terrestrial biodiversity and the ecosystem services that it provides1,2. Ambitious targets have been proposed, such as reversing the declining trends in biodiversity3; however, just feeding the growing human population will make this a challenge4. Here we use an ensemble of land-use and biodiversity models to assess whether—and how—humanity can reverse the declines in terrestrial biodiversity caused by habitat conversion, which is a major threat to biodiversity5. We show that immediate efforts, consistent with the broader sustainability agenda but of unprecedented ambition and coordination, could enable the provision of food for the growing human population while reversing the global terrestrial biodiversity trends caused by habitat conversion. If we decide to increase the extent of land under conservation management, restore degraded land and generalize landscape-level conservation planning, biodiversity trends from habitat conversion could become positive by the mid-twenty-first century on average across models (confidence interval, 2042–2061), but this was not the case for all models. Food prices could increase and, on average across models, almost half (confidence interval, 34–50%) of the future biodiversity losses could not be avoided. However, additionally tackling the drivers of land-use change could avoid conflict with affordable food provision and reduces the environmental effects of the food-provision system. Through further sustainable intensification and trade, reduced food waste and more plant-based human diets, more than two thirds of future biodiversity losses are avoided and the biodiversity trends from habitat conversion are reversed by 2050 for almost all of the models. Although limiting further loss will remain challenging in several biodiversity-rich regions, and other threats—such as climate change—must be addressed to truly reverse the declines in biodiversity, our results show that ambitious conservation efforts and food system transformation are central to an effective post-2020 biodiversity strategy