Abstract
Land is a key resource, not only for human societies but also for all organisms—animals, plants and microorganisms—that inhabit terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Humans use land for at least three purposes: resource supply, waste repository and living space (i.e., the area required for production, consumption, transport, recreation and many other activities). Land use involves the ‘colonization of ecosystems’, that is, purposive interventions into terrestrial ecosystems that aim to support these functions, usually by transforming natural into managed ecosystems (e.g., agro-ecosystems , managed forests, urban systems). Increasingly, land use also aims at other services, such as the conservation of habitats , species or ecosystems or increased carbon sequestration . Maximization of one function, such as biomass supply , often affects other functions, such as carbon sequestration or conservation. Along with the growth of the world population and its per-capita consumption, trade-off s among different functions are becoming more important. A particularly relevant example is the trade-off between food and fuel that has become apparent in the last few years as policies promoting bioenergy on agricultural lands have gained momentum. Although some of these trade-offs can only be mitigated but not completely avoided (e.g., biomass production requires limited resources such as productive area and water), a sociometabolic approach can help identify potential synergies. For example, the use of wastes, by-products and residues (‘cascade utilization ’) may help to increase biomass use efficiency and generate several outputs without resulting in resource competition . This chapter discusses such trade-offs and synergies in global land use with a view toward issues of resource supply (mainly food and energy) as well as various ecological conservation aspects (e.g., biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and environmentally less-demanding agricultural technologies).
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- 1.
In this chapter, we discuss a land surface of approximately 130 million km²; that is, all of the earth’s land outside Greenland and Antarctica.
- 2.
We also analyzed variants of the ‘baseline diet’ by tweaking the production of animal products (a) toward pigs and poultry (+50 %, milk and ruminant meat reduced accordingly) and (b) toward ruminants by reducing pig and poultry products by 50 % and increasing ruminants accordingly. In both cases, the total consumption of animal products was assumed to remain the same as in the baseline.
- 3.
Pets could not be modeled explicitly due to a lack of data. For the year 2000, their feed intake is included in the animal production/consumption data. Implicitly, this means they are scaled up/downward with changes assumed in animal product consumption in the different diet variants.
- 4.
BioBaM distinguishes 11 world regions, seven crop aggregates and two different animal production systems (ruminants, monogastrics). The results can be disaggregated in geographic information system (GIS) grids with a five-minute geographic resolution (ca. 10 km at the equator) based on data by Erb et al. (2007).
- 5.
In all scenarios, urban and infrastructure areas are assumed to grow by +24 % until 2050. Cropland area demand is calculated from food demand according to the variants of yields and feeding efficiencies. The world population in 2050 is assumed to be nine billion.
- 6.
Exceptions include raised bogs, which are able to create long-term carbon sinks because of the exclusion of oxygen in the soil.
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Acknowledgements
Funding by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) within the project P20812-G11, by the European Research Council within ERC Starting Grant 263522 LUISE and by the EU-FP7 project VOLANTE is gratefully acknowledged. This chapter was written in parts during Helmut Haberl’s research stay at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformation in Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
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Haberl, H., Erb, KH., Kastner, T., Lauk, C., Mayer, A. (2016). Systemic Feedbacks in Global Land Use. In: Haberl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., Krausmann, F., Winiwarter, V. (eds) Social Ecology. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33326-7_14
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