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Zhen, L., Deng, X., Wei, Y., Jiang, Q., Lin, Y., Helming, K., et al. (2014). Future land use and food security scenarios for the Guyuan district of remote western China. iForest, 7(6), 372–384.
Abstract: Government policy is a major human factor that causes changes in land use. Decisions on land management and land-use planning, as well as the analysis and quantification of policy consequences, may greatly benefit from the simulation of the dynamics of land-use systems. In the present study, we predicted land-use changes and their potential impacts on food security in the environmentally fragile Guyuan District, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (north-central China), under the influence of a program to convert sloping agricultural land to conservation uses. Baseline and conservation policy scenarios (2005 to 2020) were developed based on input from local stakeholders and expert knowledge. For the baseline and conservation policies, we formulated high-, moderate-, and low-growth scenarios, analyzed the driving mechanisms responsible for the land-use dynamics, and then applied a previously developed “dynamics of land systems” model to simulate changes in land uses based on the driving mechanisms. We found that spatially explicit policies can promote the conversion of land to more sustainable uses; however, decreasing the amount of agricultural and urban land and increasing grassland and forest cover will increase the risk of grain shortages, and the effect will be more severe under the conservation and high- growth scenarios than under the baseline and low-growth scenarios. The Guyuan case study suggests that, during the next decade, important trade-offs between environmental conservation and food security will inevitably occur. Future land-use decisions should carefully consider the balance between land resource conservation, agricultural production, and urban expansion.
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Porter, J. R., Dyball, R., Dumaresq, D., Deutsch, L., & Matsuda, H. (2014). Feeding capitals: Urban food security and self-provisioning in Canberra, Copenhagen and Tokyo. Global Food Security, 3(1), 1–7.
Abstract: Most people live in cities, but most food system studies and food security issues focus on the rural poor. Urban populations differ from rural populations in their food consumption by being generally wealthier, requiring food trade for their food security, defined as the extent to which people have adequate diets. Cities rarely have the self-provisioning capacity to satisfy their own food supply, understood as the extent to which the food consumed by the city’s population is produced from the city’s local agro-ecosystems. Almost inevitably, a city’s food security is augmented by production from remote landscapes, both internal and external in terms of a state’s jurisdiction. We reveal the internal and external food flows necessary for the food security of three wealthy capital cities (Canberra, Australia; Copenhagen, Denmark; Tokyo, Japan). These cities cover two orders of magnitude in population size and three orders of magnitude in population density. From traded volumes of food and their sources into the cities, we calculate the productivity of the city’s regional and non-regional ecosystems that provide food for these cities and estimate the overall utilised land area. The three cities exhibit differing degrees of food self provisioning capacity and exhibit large differences in the areas on which they depend to provide their food. We show that, since 1965, global land area effectively imported to produce food for these cities has increased with their expanding populations, with large reductions in the percentage of demand met by local agro-ecosystems. The physical trading of food commodities embodies ecosystem services, such as water, soil fertility and pollination that are required for land-based food production. This means that the trade in these embodied ecosystem services has become as important for food security as traditional economic mechanisms such as market access and trade. A future policy question, raised by our study, is the degree to which governments will remain committed to open food trade policies in the face of national political unrest caused by food shortages. Our study demonstrates the need to determine the food security and self-provisioning capacity of a wide range of rich and poor cities, taking into account the global location of the ecosystems that are provisioning them. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Graef, F., Sieber, S., Mutabazi, K., Asch, F., Biesalski, H. K., Bitegeko, J., et al. (2014). Framework for participatory food security research in rural food value chains. Global Food Security, 3(1), 8–15.
Abstract: Enhancing food security for poor and vulnerable people requires adapting rural food systems to various driving factors. Food security-related research should apply participatory action research that considers the entire food value chain to ensure sustained success. This article presents a research framework that focusses on determining, prioritising, testing, adapting and disseminating food securing upgrading strategies across the multiple components of rural food value chains. These include natural resources, Food production, processing, markets, consumption and waste management. Scientists and policy makers jointly use tools developed for assessing potentials for enhancing regional food security at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The research is being conducted in Tanzania as a case study for Sub-Saharan countries and is done in close collaboration with local, regional and national stakeholders, encompassing all activities across all different food sectors. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Bennetzen, E. H., Smith, P., & Porter, J. R. (2016). Agricultural production and greenhouse gas emissions from world regions—The major trends over 40 years. Glob. Environ. Change, 37, 43–55.
Abstract: Since 1970, global agricultural production has more than doubled with agriculture and land-use change now responsible for similar to 1/4 of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. Yet, while greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per unit of agricultural product have been reduced at a global level, trends in world regions have been quantified less thoroughly. The KPI (Kaya-Porter Identity) is a novel framework for analysing trends in agricultural production and land-use change and related GHG emissions. We apply this to assess trends and differences in nine world regions over the period 1970-2007. We use a deconstructed analysis of emissions from the mix of multiple sources, and show how each is changing in terms of absolute emissions on a per area and per produced unit basis, and how the change of emissions from each source contributes to the change in total emissions over time. The doubling of global agricultural production has mainly been delivered by developing and transitional countries, and this has been mirrored by increased GHG emissions. The decoupling of emissions from production shows vast regional differences. Our estimates show that emissions per unit crop (as kg CO2-equivalents per Giga Joule crop product), in Oceania, have been reduced by 94% from 1093 to 69; in Central & South America by 57% from 849 to 362; in sub-Saharan Africa by 27% from 421 to 309, and in Europe by 56% from 86 to 38. Emissions per unit livestock (as kg CO2-eq. GJ(-1) livestock product) have reduced; in sub-Saharan Africa by 24% from 6001 to 4580; in Central & South America by 61% from 3742 to 1448; in Central & Eastern Asia by 82% from 3,205 to 591, and; in North America by 28% from 878 to 632. In general, intensive and industrialised systems show the lowest emissions per unit of agricultural production. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Kahiluoto, H., Kaseva, J., Hakala, K., Himanen, S. J., Jauhiainen, L., Rötter, R. P., et al. (2014). Cultivating resilience by empirically revealing response diversity. Glob. Environ. Change, 25, 186–193.
Abstract: Intensified climate and market turbulence requires resilience to a multitude of changes. Diversity reduces the sensitivity to disturbance and fosters the capacity to adapt to various future scenarios. What really matters is diversity of responses. Despite appeals to manage resilience, conceptual developments have not yet yielded a break-through in empirical applications. Here, we present an approach to empirically reveal the ‘response diversity’: the factors of change that are critical to a system are identified, and the response diversity is determined based on the documented component responses to these factors. We illustrate this approach and its added value using an example of securing food supply in the face of climate variability and change. This example demonstrates that quantifying response diversity allows for a new perspective: despite continued increase in cultivar diversity of barley, the diversity in responses to weather declined during the last decade in the regions where most of the barley is grown in Finland. This was due to greater homogeneity in responses among new cultivars than among older ones. Such a decline in the response diversity indicates increased vulnerability and reduced resilience. The assessment serves adaptive management in the face of both ecological and socioeconomic drivers. Supplier diversity in the food retail industry in order to secure affordable food in spite of global price volatility could represent another application. The approach is, indeed, applicable to any system for which it is possible to adopt empirical information regarding the response by its components to the critical factors of variability and change. Targeting diversification in response to critical change brings efficiency into diversity. We propose the generic procedure that is demonstrated in this study as a means to efficiently enhance resilience at multiple levels of agrifood systems and beyond. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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