“We at Ethical Markets agree with these conclusions and our research in our Green Transition Scoreboard® reports that expanding human food systems to include saltwater agriculture growing halophyte food plants (e.g. quinoa, Salicornia, China’s salt-tolerant rice) can also reduce the need to irrigate current crops with the planet’s 3 % precious freshwater, improve human nutrition and capture huge volumes of ambient CO2, see:
“Capturing CO2 While Improving Human Nutrition and Health“ (2018).
~Hazel Henderson, Editor“
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Summary:
A study now suggests a comprehensive solution package for feeding 10 billion people within our planet’s environmental boundaries. Supplying a sufficient and healthy diet for every person whilst keeping our biosphere largely intact will require no less than a technological and socio-cultural U-turn. It includes adopting radically different ways of farming, reduction of food waste, and dietary changes.
“When looking at the status of planet Earth and the influence of current global agriculture practices upon it, there’s a lot of reason to worry, but also reason for hope — if we see decisive actions very soon,” Dieter Gerten says, lead author from PIK and professor at Humboldt University of Berlin. “Currently, almost half of global food production relies on crossing Earth’s environmental boundaries. We appropriate too much land for crops and livestock, fertilize too heavily and irrigate too extensively. To solve this issue in the face of a still growing world population, we collectively need to rethink how to produce food. Excitingly, our research shows that such transformations will make it possible to provide enough food for up to 10 billion people.”
The researchers ask the question how many people could be fed while keeping a strict standard of environmental sustainability worldwide. These environmental capacities are defined in terms of a set of planetary boundaries — scientifically defined targets of maximum allowed human interference with processes that regulate the state of the planet. The present study accounts for four of nine boundaries most relevant for agriculture: Biosphere integrity (keeping biodiversity and ecosystems intact), land-system change, freshwater use, and nitrogen flows. Based on a sophisticated simulation model, the impacts of food on these boundaries are scrutinised at a level of spatial and process detail never accomplished before, and moreover aggregated to the entire planet. This analysis demonstrates where and how many boundaries are being violated by current food production and in which ways this development could be reverted through adopting more sustainable forms of agriculture.
Globally differentiated picture: In some regions, less would be more
The encouraging result is that, in theory, 10 billion people can be fed without compromising the Earth system. This leads to very interesting conclusions, as Johan Rockström, director of PIK points out: “We find that currently, agriculture in many regions is using too much water, land, or fertilizer. Production in these regions thus needs to be brought into line with environmental sustainability. Yet, there are huge opportunities to sustainably increase agricultural production in these and other regions. This goes for large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where more efficient water and nutrient management could strongly improve yields.”
As a positive side effect, sustainable agriculture can increase overall climate resilience while also limiting global warming. In other places, however, farming is so far off local and Earth’s boundaries that even more sustainable systems could not completely balance the pressure on the environment, such as in parts of the Middle East, Indonesia, and to some extent in Central Europe. Even after recalibrating agricultural production, international trade will remain a key element of a sustainably fed world.
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