Combining mitigation strategies to increase co-benefits for biodiversity and food security

Rémi Prudhomme (1, 2) , Adriana De Palma (3) , Patrice Dumas (1, 2) , Ricardo Gonzalez (4, 3) , Paul Leadley (5) , Harold Levrel (1) , Andy Purvis (3, 4) , Thierry Brunelle (1, 2)

1 CIRED - Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement
2 Cirad-ES - Département Environnements et Sociétés
3 NHM - The Natural History Museum [London]
4 Imperial College London
5 ESE - Ecologie Systématique et Evolution

World agriculture needs to find the right balance to cope with the trilemma between feeding a growing population, reducing its impact on biodiversity and minimizing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this paper, we evaluate a broad range of scenarios that achieve 4.3 GtCO2,eq/year GHG mitigation in the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land-Use (AFOLU) sector by 2100. Scenarios include varying mixes of three GHG mitigation policies: second-generation biofuel production, dietary change and reforestation of pasture. We find that focusing mitigation on a single policy can lead to positive results for a single indicator of food security or biodiversity conservation, but with significant negative side effects on others. A balanced portfolio of all three mitigation policies, while not optimal for any single criterion, minimizes trade-offs by avoiding large negative effects on food security and biodiversity conservation. At the regional scale, the trade-off seen globally between biodiversity and food security is nuanced by different regional contexts.

Mots clés: bioenergy; food security; biodiversity; mitigation; global scale; land-use; trade-off; dietary change; reforestation

Domaines: Biodiversité et Ecologie; Environnement et Société; Agriculture, économie et politique

Rémi Prudhomme, Adriana De Palma, Patrice Dumas, Ricardo Gonzalez, Paul Leadley, et al.. Combining mitigation strategies to increase co-benefits for biodiversity and food security. Environmental Research Letters, 2020, 15 (11), pp.114005. ⟨10.1088/1748-9326/abb10a⟩. ⟨hal-03206590⟩