Benefits and trade-offs of optimizing global land use for food, water, and carbon

Abstract

Current large-scale patterns of land use reflect history, local traditions, and production costs, much more so than they reflect biophysical potential or global supply and demand for food and freshwater, or-more recently-climate change mitigation. We quantified alternative land-use allocations that consider trade-offs for these demands by combining a dynamic vegetation model and an optimization algorithm to determine Pareto-optimal land-use allocations under changing climate conditions in 2090-2099 and alternatively in 2033-2042. These form the outer bounds of the option space for global land-use transformation. Results show a potential to increase all three indicators (+83% in crop production, +8% in available runoff, and +3% in carbon storage globally) compared to the current land-use configuration, with clear land-use priority areas: Tropical and boreal forests were preserved, crops were produced in temperate regions, and pastures were preferentially allocated in semiarid grasslands and savannas. Transformations toward optimal land-use patterns would imply extensive reconfigurations and changes in land management, but the required annual land-use changes were nevertheless of similar magnitude as those suggested by established land-use change scenarios. The optimization results clearly show that large benefits could be achieved when land use is reconsidered under a "global supply" perspective with a regional focus that differs across the world's regions in order to achieve the supply of key ecosystem services under the emerging global pressures.