Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    Global and country-level data of the biodiversity footprints of 175 crops and pasture
    (Amsterdam [u.a.] : Elsevier, 2021) Beyer, Robert; Manica, Andrea
    The destruction of natural habitat for cropland and pasture represents a major threat to global biodiversity. Despite widespread societal concern about biodiversity loss associated with food production, consumer access to quantitative estimates of the impact of crop production on the world's species has been very limited compared to assessments of other environmental variables such as greenhouse gas emissions or water use. Here, we present a consistent dataset of the biodiversity footprints of pasture and 175 crops at the global and national level. The data were generated by combining maps of the global distribution of agricultural areas in the year 2000 with spatially explicit estimates of the biodiversity loss associated with the conversion of natural habitat to farmland. Estimates were derived for three common alternative measures of biodiversity - species richness, threatened species richness, and range rarity - of the world's mammals, birds, and amphibians. Our dataset provides important quantitative information for food consumers and policy makers, allowing them to take evidence-based decisions to reduce the biodiversity footprint of global food production.
  • Item
    Shared Socio-economic Pathways for European agriculture and food systems: The Eur-Agri-SSPs
    (Amsterdam [u.a.] : Elsevier, 2020) Le Mouël, Chantal; Mathijs, Erik; Mehdi, Bano; Mittenzwei, Klaus; Mora, Olivier; Øistad, Knut; Øygarden, Lillian; Priess, Jörg A.; Reidsma, Pytrik; Schaldach, Rüdiger; Schönhart, Martin; Mitter, Hermine; Techen, Anja-K.; Sinabell, Franz; Helming, Katharina; Schmid, Erwin; Bodirsky, Benjamin L.; Holman, Ian; Kok, Kasper; Lehtonen, Heikki; Leip, Adrian
    Scenarios describe plausible and internally consistent views of the future. They can be used by scientists, policymakers and entrepreneurs to explore the challenges of global environmental change given an appropriate level of spatial and sectoral detail and systematic development. We followed a nine-step protocol to extend and enrich a set of global scenarios – the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) – providing regional and sectoral detail for European agriculture and food systems using a one-to-one nesting participatory approach. The resulting five Eur-Agri-SSPs are titled (1) Agriculture on sustainable paths, (2) Agriculture on established paths, (3) Agriculture on separated paths, (4) Agriculture on unequal paths, and (5) Agriculture on high-tech paths. They describe alternative plausible qualitative evolutions of multiple drivers of particular importance and high uncertainty for European agriculture and food systems. The added value of the protocol-based storyline development process lies in the conceptual and methodological transparency and rigor; the stakeholder driven selection of the storyline elements; and consistency checks within and between the storylines. Compared to the global SSPs, the five Eur-Agri-SSPs provide rich thematic and regional details and are thus a solid basis for integrated assessments of agriculture and food systems and their response to future socio-economic and environmental changes. © 2020 The Author(s)