Publication
Mapping potential conflicts between global agriculture and terrestrial conservation
Publisher:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date:
30-05-2023
DOI:
10.1073/PNAS.2208376120
Abstract: Demand for food products, often from international trade, has brought agricultural land use into direct competition with bio ersity. Where these potential conflicts occur and which consumers are responsible is poorly understood. By combining conservation priority (CP) maps with agricultural trade data, we estimate current potential conservation risk hotspots driven by 197 countries across 48 agricultural products. Globally, a third of agricultural production occurs in sites of high CP (CP 0.75, max = 1.0). While cattle, maize, rice, and soybean pose the greatest threat to very high-CP sites, other low-conservation risk products (e.g., sugar beet, pearl millet, and sunflower) currently are less likely to be grown in sites of agriculture–conservation conflict. Our analysis suggests that a commodity can cause dissimilar conservation threats in different production regions. Accordingly, some of the conservation risks posed by different countries depend on their demand and sourcing patterns of agricultural commodities. Our spatial analyses identify potential hotspots of competition between agriculture and high-conservation value sites (i.e., 0.5° resolution, or ~367 to 3,077km 2 , grid cells containing both agriculture and high-bio ersity priority habitat), thereby providing additional information that could help prioritize conservation activities and safeguard bio ersity in in idual countries and globally. A web-based GIS tool at io ersity/ systematically visualizes the results of our analyses.
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