Open AccessCombining mitigation strategies to increase co-benefits for biodiversity and food security
Author(s) -
Rémi Prudhomme,
Adriana De Palma,
Patrice Dumas,
Ricardo E. Gonzalez,
Paul Leadley,
Harold Levrel,
Andy Purvis,
Thierry Brunelle
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
environmental research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.37
H-Index - 124
ISSN - 1748-9326
DOI - 10.1088/1748-9326/abb10a
Subject(s) - food security , greenhouse gas , biodiversity , trilemma , natural resource economics , agriculture , portfolio , business , environmental science , land use , environmental resource management , economics , geography , ecology , biology , archaeology , finance , exchange rate
World agriculture needs to find the right balance to cope with the trilemma between feeding a growing population, reducing its impact on biodiversity and minimizing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this paper, we evaluate a broad range of scenarios that achieve 4.3 GtCO 2,eq /year GHG mitigation in the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land-Use (AFOLU) sector by 2100. Scenarios include varying mixes of three GHG mitigation policies: second-generation biofuel production, dietary change and reforestation of pasture. We find that focusing mitigation on a single policy can lead to positive results for a single indicator of food security or biodiversity conservation, but with significant negative side effects on others. A balanced portfolio of all three mitigation policies, while not optimal for any single criterion, minimizes trade-offs by avoiding large negative effects on food security and biodiversity conservation. At the regional scale, the trade-off seen globally between biodiversity and food security is nuanced by different regional contexts.