Journal article
Sustainable pathways towards climate and biodiversity goals in the UK: the importance of managing land-use synergies and trade-offs
- Abstract:
- Agricultural and environmental policies are being fundamentally reviewed and redesigned in the UK following its exit from the European Union. The UK government and the Devolved Administrations recognise that current land use is not sustainable and that there is now an unprecedented opportunity to define a better land strategy that responds fully to the interconnected challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and sustainable development. This paper presents evidence from three pathways (current trends, sustainable medium ambition, and sustainable high ambition) to mid-century that were co-created with UK policymakers. The pathways were applied to a national integrated food and land-use model (the FABLE calculator) to explore potential synergies and trade-offs between achieving multiple sustainability targets under limited land availability and constraints to balance food supply and demand at national and global levels. Results show that under the Current Trends pathway all unprotected open natural land would be converted to urban, agriculture and afforested land, with the consequence that from 2030 onwards tree planting targets could not be met. In contrast, the two sustainable pathways illustrate how dietary change, agricultural productivity improvements and waste reduction can free up land for nature recovery and carbon sequestration. This enables a transition to a sustainable food and land-use system that provides a net carbon sink with up to 44% of land able to support biodiversity conservation. We highlight key trade-offs and synergies, which are important to consider for designing and implementing emerging national policies. These include the strong dependence of climate, food and biodiversity targets on dietary shifts, sustainable improvements in agricultural productivity, improved land-use design for protecting and restoring nature, and rapid reductions in food loss and waste.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 873.0KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11625-022-01242-8
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Sustainability Science More from this journal
- Volume:
- 18
- Pages:
- 521-538
- Publication date:
- 2022-11-07
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-09-07
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1862-4057
- ISSN:
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1862-4065
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1277964
- Local pid:
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pubs:1277964
- Deposit date:
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2022-09-08
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Smith et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2022, The Author(s) This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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