Is there sufficient land on Earth to combat local weather change and feed the world?

Capping world warming at 1.5 levels Celsius is a tall order. Achieving that aim won’t solely require a large discount in greenhouse gasoline emissions from human actions, but additionally a considerable reallocation of land to help that effort and maintain the biosphere, together with people. More land will likely be wanted to accommodate a rising demand for bioenergy and nature-based carbon sequestration whereas guaranteeing adequate acreage for meals manufacturing and ecological sustainability.

The increasing position of land in a 1.5 C world will likely be twofold — to take away carbon dioxide from the environment and to provide clear power. Land-based carbon dioxide elimination methods embrace bioenergy with carbon seize and storage; direct air seize; and afforestation/reforestation and different nature-based options. Land-based clear power manufacturing contains wind and photo voltaic farms and sustainable bioenergy cropland. Any choice to allocate extra land for local weather mitigation should additionally deal with competing wants for long-term meals safety and ecosystem well being.

Land-based local weather mitigation decisions differ when it comes to prices — quantity of land required, implications for meals safety, influence on biodiversity and different ecosystem providers — and advantages — potential for sequestering greenhouse gases and producing clear power.

Now a examine within the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science gives probably the most complete evaluation so far of competing land-use and know-how choices to restrict world warming to 1.5 C. Led by researchers on the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3), the examine applies the MIT Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework to judge prices and advantages of various land-based local weather mitigation choices in Sky2050, a 1.5 C climate-stabilization state of affairs developed by Shell.

Under this state of affairs, demand for bioenergy and pure carbon sinks improve together with the necessity for sustainable farming and meals manufacturing. To decide if there’s sufficient land to fulfill all these rising calls for, the analysis workforce makes use of the worldwide hectare (gha) — an space of 10,000 sq. meters, or 2.471 acres — as the usual unit of measurement, and present estimates of the Earth’s complete liveable land space (about 10 gha) and land space used for meals manufacturing and bioenergy (5 gha).

The workforce finds that with transformative modifications in coverage, land administration practices, and consumption patterns, world land is adequate to offer a sustainable provide of meals and ecosystem providers all through this century whereas additionally decreasing greenhouse gasoline emissions in alignment with the 1.5 C aim. These transformative modifications embrace insurance policies to guard pure ecosystems; cease deforestation and speed up reforestation and afforestation; promote advances in sustainable agriculture know-how and apply; scale back agricultural and meals waste; and incentivize customers to buy sustainably produced items.

If such modifications are applied, 2.5–3.5 gha of land can be used for NBS practices to sequester 3–6 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ per yr, and 0.4–0.6 gha of land can be allotted for power manufacturing — 0.2–0.3 gha for bioenergy and 0.2–0.35 gha for wind and solar energy era.

“Our state of affairs reveals that there’s sufficient land to help a 1.5 diploma C future so long as efficient insurance policies at nationwide and world ranges are in place,” says CS3 Principal Research Scientist Angelo Gurgel, the examine’s lead creator. “These insurance policies should not solely promote environment friendly use of land for meals, power, and nature, but additionally be supported by long-term commitments from authorities and trade decision-makers.”