Negative Impacts of Global Agriculture on the Environment Assessed in Olomouc

Global impacts of high agricultural land-use intensity on biological diversity have been assessed by a study conducted by experts from the UP Faculty of Science and their German colleagues. For the first time in the world, they provided a spatial analysis of various indicators of agricultural production and species richness for various taxonomic groups. Thanks to these data, scientists can now search ways how to secure the increasing consumption of food in the world and to minimise the negative impact of agriculture on environment.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that we will need 50 percent more food by 2050 than we need today. Agricultural production will have to be increased. According to environmentalists, this will result in further pressure on biological diversity, which has been negatively affected mostly as a consequence of the expansion of agricultural land-use to natural areas. One of the proposed solutions involves increasing the yield of world’s major crops on existing agricultural locations. According to the study of the experts from the Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions, this approach is rather simplistic.

 

“Focussing on the crop yield only means overlooking a large part of the problem and ignoring many factors that contribute to the decrease in biological diversity – such as salinisation of soil due to irrigation, release of toxic substances in animal farming and so forth. However, reliable data on these factors and global maps of species richness for a large part of the world have not been available until recently,” said one of the authors of the study, Tomáš Václavík. He and his colleagues conducted a spatial analysis of 13 indicators of agricultural production (the extent of arable land, types of crops, application of fertilisers, irrigations, and others) and species richness for various taxonomic groups. The inclusion of various indicators of agricultural land-use intensity may help reveal new critical regions where rare plant and animal species are most threatened by human activity.

 

“What is critical today s that many such regions with high land-use intensity, located for example in South America, China, and Eastern Africa, are characterised with high endemism richness, and yet they are not internationally recognised as so-called biodiversity hotspots and frequently lack any form of protection. Our study demonstrates that if we want to find sustainable ways of feeding the world and minimising the impacts on environment, we must take into consideration an entire spectrum of factors related to intensification of agriculture on global level,” concluded Václavík. An opposite approach can substantially underestimate the threats that land-use intensification poses for the world’s biodiversity, as Václavík added.

 

Their findings will be used as study materials // a groundwork // sources for the Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP CBD) and for newly developing Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

 

 

 

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