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Impact of agricultural land conversion on climate change

Environment, Development and Sustainability volume 23, pages 3187–3198 (2021)Cite this article

Abstract

Climate change and land use conversion are two major global environmental issues. A claim is made that climate change has brought new challenges for global land use, while land use conversion is hardly realized as a major driver for climate change. Using mapping techniques, this study aims to investigate the relationship between climate change and agricultural land conversion (ALC), by which land is converted from agricultural to other uses (e.g., urban areas, national and natural parks, roads, industrial areas, and afforestation projects). CO2 emission is considered as the main impact of climate change, and agricultural land conversion is regarded as the most important global land use. In this study, data are obtained from two databases: the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for the period of 1962–2011. Considering the FAO (2015) classification, the countries are categorized into five different groups (high-income non-OECD, high-income OECD, upper-middle-, lower-middle-, and low-income countries). Economies were divided into several income groups according to 2014 gross national income per capita. The results show that agricultural areas in high-income countries have decreased, while in low- to middle-income countries, they have increased. The highest CO2 emissions can be observed, especially in high-income countries, whereas the lowest CO2 emissions happen in the low- and lower-middle-income countries. The results further show that there is a positive relationship between CO2 emissions and ALC across the world. It can be observed that CO2 emission is increasing where agricultural area is declining. On the contrary, CO2 emission is declining where agricultural area is increasing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Hossein Azadi, Philippe De Maeyer & Frank Witlox

  2. Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Hossein Azadi

  3. Department of Agricultural Economics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Fatemeh Taheri

  4. Tropical Forages Program, International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Palmira, Colombia

    Stefan Burkart

  5. Environmental Sciences Research Institute, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

    Hossein Mahmoudi

  6. Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, China

    Philippe De Maeyer

  7. Department of Geography, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Frank Witlox

  8. College of Civil Aviation, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

    Frank Witlox

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  1. Hossein Azadi
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  2. Fatemeh Taheri
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  3. Stefan Burkart
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  4. Hossein Mahmoudi
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  5. Philippe De Maeyer
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Correspondence to Hossein Azadi.

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Azadi, H., Taheri, F., Burkart, S. et al. Impact of agricultural land conversion on climate change. Environ Dev Sustain 23, 3187–3198 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-020-00712-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-020-00712-2

Keywords

  • Global warming
  • CO2 emissions
  • Agriculture land conversion
  • Greenhouse gases
  • Land use change
  • Land cover

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