Sarah S Gall, Tom Harwood, Michael Obersteiner, Jim W Hall
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Due to the negative environmental consequences of current land-use, and land's important role regarding carbon, biodiversity and food security, there is an urgent interest in reforming land-use. Policy objectives for tree planting to sequester carbon and the protection of land to increase biodiversity require land reallocation, which leads to inevitable trade-offs. Here, we evaluate the trade-offs between three objectives for rural land: agricultural/forestry production, carbon sequestration and biodiversity, by calculating metrics for these three objectives on a 500 m grid covering Great Britain. We use a multi-objective optimisation that allows us to explore the full option space of possible land conversions and identify the land allocations that entail limited trade-offs. Our results show that current land-use in Great Britain is far from optimal for any combination of objectives. We identify the locations where carbon sequestration and biodiversity can be substantially improved without compromising overall agricultural production, provided conversions are located carefully.
期刊介绍:
Communications Earth & Environment is an open access journal from Nature Portfolio publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary in all areas of the Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. Research papers published by the journal represent significant advances that bring new insight to a specialized area in Earth science, planetary science or environmental science.
Communications Earth & Environment has a 2-year impact factor of 7.9 (2022 Journal Citation Reports®). Articles published in the journal in 2022 were downloaded 1,412,858 times. Median time from submission to the first editorial decision is 8 days.