Davos / Switzerland,
24 January 2014 - Up to 849 million hectares
of natural land - nearly the size of Brazil
- may be degraded by 2050 should current
trends of unsustainable land use continue,
warns a report by the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP).
The need to feed a growing number of people
globally has led to more land being converted
to cropland at the expense of the world's
savannah, grassland and forests.
This has resulted in widespread environmental
degradation and loss of biodiversity, affecting
an estimated 23 per cent of global soil.
Agriculture currently
consumes more than 30 per cent of the world's
land area, and cropland covers around 10
per cent of global land.
Between 1961 and 2007,
cropland expanded by 11 per cent, a trend
that continues to grow.
The report, entitled
Assessing Global Land Use: Balancing Consumption
with Sustainable Supply, was produced by
the International Resource Panel: a consortium
of 27 internationally renowned resource
scientists, 33 national governments and
other groups, hosted by UNEP.
UN Under-Secretary-General
and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner
said, "The findings of the International
Resource Panel show that the world has witnessed
an unprecedented sharp decline in terrestrial
ecosystem services and functions during
the past decades. Forests and wetlands have
been converted to agricultural land to feed
growing populations but at a cost that is
not sustainable."
"Recognizing that
land is a finite resource, we need to become
more efficient in the ways we produce, supply
and consume our land-based products. We
must be able to define and adhere to the
boundaries within which the world can safely
operate to save millions of hectares by
2050," he said.
"Recommendations
from the report are meant to inform policy
and contribute to on-going discussions on
targets and indicators for sustainable resources
management as the world charts a new course
for sustainable development post-2015, "
he added.
The report outlines
the need and options to balance consumption
with sustainable production.
It focuses on land-based
products, such as food, fuel and fibre,
and describes methods to enable countries
to determine whether their consumption levels
exceed sustainable supply capacities.
At the same time it
distinguishes between gross and net expansion
of cropland.
Under a business-as-usual
scenario, the net expansion of cropland
will range from 120 to 500 million hectares
by 2050.
Shifts to more protein-rich
diets in developing countries and a growing
demand for biofuels and biomaterials, especially
in developed countries, are increasing the
demand for land.
A Safe Consumption Level
The report attempts
to answer the question: how much more land
can be used to serve the growing demand
for food and non-food biomass while keeping
the consequences of land use change (e.g.
deforestation) at a tolerable level?
The report builds on
the "Safe Operating Space" (SOS)
concept, which underpins the notion that
once human activity has passed certain thresholds
or tipping points, defined as "planetary
boundaries", there is a risk of irreversible
and abrupt environmental change.
The International Resource
Panel uses the SOS concept as a starting
point to understand how much more land use
can occur before the risk of irreversible
damage - in particular through biodiversity
loss, release of carbon dioxide, disruption
of water and nutrient cycles and loss of
fertile soil - becomes unacceptable.
It calculates that the
global cropland area available for supplying
demand could safely increase by up to 1,640
million hectares.
But warns that under
business-as-usual conditions the expected
global land demands by 2050 will overshoot
this safe operating space.
Monitoring global land
use of countries and regions for their domestic
consumption gives an indication of whether
they have exceeded or are within their safe
operating space.
For the European Union,
for instance, 0.31 hectares per person were
required in 2007. This is one-fourth more
than what is domestically available in the
EU, is one-third more that the globally
available per person cropland in 2007, and
is well above the 0.20 per person SOS target
for 2030.
The report says that
the key causes of our global challenges
are linked to unsustainable consumption
levels, but in high-consuming countries
only a few policy instruments address excessive
consumption habits and the structures that
encourage them.
At the same time, with
an expanding global population and a worldwide
trend towards urbanization, up to 5 per
cent of the global land (around 15 billion
hectares) is expected to be covered by built-up
areas by 2050.
In many cases, built
up areas expand at the expense of agricultural
land, and agricultural land expands at the
expense of forests, particularly in tropical
regions.
In addition, in the
past five decades, deforestation has occurred
at an average rate of about 13 million hectares
per year.
Reducing Land Demand
While the world's average
agricultural yield growth is slowing, the
opportunity to increase productivity in
regions with lagging yields, like sub-Saharan
Africa, seems promising.
Capacity building on
best management practices, integrating scientific
and local know-how and investing in the
remediation of degraded soils offer strong
potential for maximizing yield.
In high-consumption
regions, more efficient and equitable use
of land-based products is required.
Up to 319 million hectares
of land can be saved by 2050, if the world
follows a combination of measures designed
to keep cropland expansion within the safe
operating space.
These measures include:
Improve land management
and land use planning in order to minimize
the expansion of build-up land on fertile
soils;
Invest in the restoration of degraded land;
Improve agricultural production practices
to increase intensification in an ecologically
and socially acceptable way;
Monitor global land use requirements of
countries for the total consumption of agricultural
goods in order to allow comparisons with
the global average and sustainable supply
and implications on sectoral policies;
Reduce food waste and shift towards more
vegetable diets;
Reduce the subsidization of fuel crops -
including the reduction and phase out of
biofuel quotas in consuming countries.
More Findings from the Report
More than half of the
synthetic nitrogen fertilizer ever produced
has been used up in the past 25 years.
By 2005, the 10 largest seed corporations
controlled half of all commercial seed sales;
the top 5 grain trading companies controlled
75 per cent of the market, and the 10 largest
pesticide manufacturers supplied 84 per
cent of pesticides.
International agricultural trade has increased
tenfold since the 1960s.
A global agricultural trade has emerged,
characterized by high levels of agribusiness
concentration, a rapid increase in the share
of retail food sales by supermarket chains,
and growth in the trade of foodstuffs, fertilizers
and pesticides.
Food prices remain below their peak in 2008,
but are higher than pre-crisis levels in
many developing countries.
Towards More Sustainable Land-use
The report makes a number
of cross-cutting recommendations, which
taken together could help limit cropland
expansion to an additional 8-37 per cent
by 2050, allowing the world to stay within
its safe operating space.
These include:
Improving information
systems, especially to monitor domestic
land use, and foreign land use for domestic
production and consumption;
Land use planning to prevent the loss of
high-value natural areas to the encroachment
of cropland and to avoid the spread of built-up
areas onto fertile soil;
Harmonizing food security, energy, rural
development and industrial policies through
economy-wide programmes for sustainable
resource management;
Economic instruments to trigger sustainable
supply and demand; for example, a "subsidy
to sustainability" approach to foster
long-term soil productivity;
Targeting public investment to focus on
the needs of smallholders to enhance food
security and living conditions in rural
areas.
Notes to Editors
To download a copy of
the report, please visit: www.unep.org/resourcepanel
(from 24 January)
UNEP's 2012 Foresight report ranked the
issue of global food safety and security
among the top three global challenges. The
integration of the biodiversity theme into
environmental and economic agendas and the
new rush for land were within the top twelve.
About the International Resource Panel
The International Resource
Panel was established in 2007 to provide
independent, coherent and authoritative
scientific assessment on the sustainable
use of natural resources and the environmental
impacts of resource use over the full life
cycle. By providing up-to-date information
and best science available, the International
Resource Panel contributes to a better understanding
of how to decouple human development and
economic growth from environmental degradation.
The information contained in the International
Resource Panel's reports is intended to
be policy relevant and support policy framing,
policy and programme planning, and enable
evaluation and monitoring of policy effectiveness.
About UNEP
Created
in 1972, UNEP represents the United Nations'
environmental conscience. Based in Nairobi,
Kenya, its mission is to provide leadership
and encourage partnership in caring for
the environment by inspiring, informing,
and enabling nations and peoples to improve
their quality of life without compromising
that of future generations. UNEP's Division
of Technology, Industry and Economics -
based in Paris - helps governments, local
authorities and decision-makers in business
and industry to develop and implement policies
and practices focusing on sustainable development.
The Division leads UNEP's work in the areas
of climate change, resource efficiency,
harmful substances and hazardous waste.