Rethinking Global Land Use in an Urban Era

4. Finite Land Resources and Competition

4 Finite Land Resources and Competition Helmut Haberl, Cheikh Mbow, Xiangzheng Deng, Elena G. Irwin, Suzi Kerr, Tobias Kuemmerle, Ole Mertz, Patrick Meyfroidt, and B. L. Turner II Abstract Rising demand for land-based products (food, feed, fiber, and bioenergy) as well as conservation of forests and carbon sinks create increasing competition for land. Landuse competition has many drivers, takes different forms, and can have many significant implications for ecosystems as well as societal well-being. This chapter discusses several emerging issues, including the effect of increased demand for nonprovisioning ecosystem services (biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration), urbanization , bioenergy, and teleconnections. Three major types of land-use competition are discerned: production versus production (e.g., food vs. fuel), production versus conservation (e.g., food production vs. conservation), and built-up environment versus production or conservation (e.g., food vs. urban). Sustainability impacts that result from land-use competition are analyzed and found to differ strongly between the different types of land-use competition. They are associated with important trade-offs and high uncertainty. Institutional aspects related to land-use competition are discussed using a conceptual model that distinguishes types of institutions (government, private, community) as well as their functions (objectives, distribution/equity, effectiveness/ efficiency). Analysis of long-term trajectories suggests that land-use competition is likely to intensify in the medium- to long-term future, mainly in the face of expected scarcities in resource supply (e.g., in terms of limited resources such as fossil fuels), mitigation and adaptation policies related to climate change, as well as climate change impacts and demographic pressures. The chapter concludes with a discussion of major research gaps, and it outlines priority research topics, including the improved analysis of interdependencies of land and energy systems, “land architecture” (i.e., the significance of spatial configurations), and multiscale models to assess local-global connections and impacts. 36 H. Haberl et al. Introduction Competition for land is emerging as a globally pressing issue due to the sheer scale of global demand for land-based products and critical changes in processes of society-nature interaction that affect land use. The potential magnitude of the changes to the land surface of Earth that result from this increased competition is large, and land-use competition can have major implications for ecosystems and societal well-being (Coelho et al. 2012; Smith et al. 2010). In some cases, increased competition is due to new sources of demand (e.g., nascent markets for ecosystem services that have arisen from increased global demand for biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and other services) whereas in others, long-standing forms of land-use competition reach threshold levels due to changes in environmental processes (e.g., climate change) that have intensified the biophysical and human impacts of land competition (Andersen et al. 2009). Indeed, Lambin and Meyfroidt (2011) suggest that society may face a looming global scarcity of productive lands over the coming decades. Land-use competition is a systemic phenomenon characterized by complex feedback processes between human and biophysical components in the land system (Figure 4.1). Limits to land-based production, beyond those set by net primary production (Vitousek et al. 1986), and the losses in ecosystem services which a land system can withstand, are set by ambient environmental conditions of the land and the technomanagerial system employed on it, both of which vary considerably . For example, until recently the Chaco region of Argentina was not considered ideal for cultivation; however, drought-tolerant soybean strains have made it so (Zak et al. 2008). Perhaps even more difficult is the complexity of decision factors that determine which land-use system is employed. Consistent Critical changes in land-use processes Intensification of key types of global land competition Human and biophysical impacts Sustainability Changes in governance Figure 4.1 Conceptualization of the complex feedback processes involved in landuse competition. Competition for land both results from and affects a host of other factors such as governance, land-use change, sustainability as well as human and biophysical impacts. Finite Land Resources and Competition 37 with the proposition that intensive agriculture spares other lands from cultivation (Balmford et al. 2005; Phalan et al. 2011), mechanized commercial cultivation based on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides in the developed world has outpaced consumption, thereby allowing substantial contraction of agricultural land without substantially increasing net imports from abroad (Krausmann et al. 2012). In developing economies, by contrast, there is little evidence that agricultural...