25-10 - Flipbook - Page 64
Hephzibah
Ministries
ber products worldwide, and plantation forests generally harbour much less biodiversity
than natural forests.
Overall, the steady slowdown in agricultural land use is welcome. However, it's not
guaranteed to continue, nor is it fast enough to bring about the land use change we
need to achieve our global climate or biodiversity goals. To keep global temperature
rise below 2C, we will need to tap the huge potential of our natural ecosystems to suck
carbon out of the atmosphere.
What will happen in the future? We think current trends
are likely to continue, with
more and more land previously used for agriculture being
freed up across the world. But
this process could also accelerate further due to a range of
promising technologies and
solutions which could produce
transformational change to
our food systems, reducing
land used for food production
even more. Some of these are
close to being a commercial
reality; others are still just ideas
in research labs.
What we can expect
Based on historical trends and
future forecasts, it is likely that
crop yields will continue to increase globally on average. In
1961, we produced just over
one tonne of grain per hectare (0.4 tonnes per acre). We
now produce over four tonnes per hectare (1.6 tonnes per acre).
Yields are still increasing in most crops and countries, with more food grown each year
on the same land, while fallow periods (time where land is left bare) are decreasing.
However, a critical unknown is climate change: depending on how much climate action we take, warmer, wetter and more extreme climates could negatively affect yield
growth, particularly if we don't adapt and develop more climate-resilient crops.
While global meat consumption is rising rapidly, driving increased demand for land, we
are seeing evidence of consumers swapping from beef and lamb 3 which use substantial amounts of land per kilogram 3 to pork and poultry, which use a lot less land. In Eu-
