Revealing the interactions between global biodiversity change and human food security

Sustainable development, aimed at ensuring human well-being while protecting the Earth's natural environment for future generations, is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. The United Nations recently agreed on a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which encompass both environmental and social targets, including halting biodiversity loss and ending hunger across the world. Importantly, these goals concern highly interlinked sectors: biodiversity and agriculture (largely for food production) interact within ecosystems, and regions of food consumption interact with areas of food production within the global food system. In this project, we will focus on evaluating and explaining the interactions between food production and biodiversity, and we will also quantify the role of trade linkages in shaping the impacts of food production on biodiversity globally.

In order to effectively progress towards the SDGs, it is necessary to understand the interactions between biodiversity changes and human food security. These interactions can take a number of forms, most obviously that agricultural land use for food production is one of the greatest pressures on biodiversity. However, biodiversity changes may also impact food production. Indeed, certain groups of species provide important services that support agriculture, such as pollination, nutrient cycling, and control of insect pests. Ecosystems with a higher diversity of species within these groups have been shown to have higher levels of certain ecosystem services, such as pollination, and to have more stable agricultural production through time.

In our previous research, we have used models of biodiversity to understand how human use of the land for agriculture impacts biodiversity across the world. We have also used these models to make predictions of how biodiversity might change in the future under different scenarios of how humans will use the land. However, these models have so far been relatively crude, which has prevented an understanding of the interactions between biodiversity and food security.

In this project, we will advance biodiversity models in three important ways to explain the interactions between biodiversity change and food production. First, we will ask how the effects of agriculture on biodiversity vary in different environments (e.g. differing in climate or in the surrounding natural habitat). This will help us identify those environments where agriculture has a smaller impact on biodiversity. Second, we will assess how the characteristics of agricultural systems, such as productivity, fertilizer and pesticide use cause different impacts on biodiversity. This will allow us to identify agricultural practices with smaller effects on biodiversity. Third, we will explore how different groups of species are impacted by agriculture. This will allow us to identify instances where there is feedback from biodiversity change to food security, for example if key groups of species such as pollinators are lost more than other species.

With our improved models, we will identify where around the world food production and biodiversity change are most strongly interacting. We will also investigate how global trade in agricultural products is linked to biodiversity change, to identify where food consumption has particularly strong biodiversity impacts, potentially in remote regions of the world. Finally, we will make future predictions to identify the pathways of development in human societies that are likely to lead to smaller or larger interactions with biodiversity.

Together, the model improvements and applications will provide a much better understanding of the interactions between biodiversity change and food security at the global scale, which will be key to guide environmental, conservation and agricultural policies aimed at achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

There are three main ways by which our proposed research will achieve societal impact. First, by feeding into international environmental processes; second, by guiding national-level policies; and third, by informing various stakeholders (governments, farmers, food retailers and consumers) of their impacts on biodiversity.

Our results will feed into international processes through established links forged by Tim Newbold and Carole Dalin. Biodiversity-focused processes include the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the Convention on Biological Diversity's Global Biodiversity Outlook, and the United Nations Global Environment Outlook. Given that we address interactions between biodiversity conservation and food security, more important will be the links to international processes that consider the links between environmental change and food security. In this regard, we will work with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the SDGs, in the latter case via the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). Our previous modelling work has already produced indicators that are used by many of these processes, including IPBES and SDSN.

To inform national policy, we are working with the policy team at the Royal Society, who work with the UK government on issues around sustainable food security, with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), whose work informs national policies in developing countries, and with the Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems (SHEFS) Project, which is working with national policy partners in India and South Africa. We will also respond to public consultations from the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

Our results linking biodiversity impacts of food production to the end-consumer of these food products via international trade will inform several relevant actors of the global food system such as food retailers, supply-chain companies, farmers and individual consumers. Tim Newbold is involved in an expert group, convened by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), developing a tool (that uses his previous models) for businesses to assess the impact of their supply chains on biodiversity. The refined models that we develop in this project will be even more relevant for the tool, and we intend (with CISL) to seek NERC innovation follow-on funding to make this happen. Carole Dalin has also established links with Cervest, a risk management platform for agri-food markets, who are interested in using the results of the research we propose here.

To support all of the above activities, we will maintain a project website through which we will make available all of our research findings and model predictions.