Global biomass production potentials exceed expected future demand without the need for cropland expansion

Abstract

Global biomass demand is expected to roughly double between 2005 and 2050. Current studies suggest that agricultural intensification through optimally managed crops on today's cropland alone is insufficient to satisfy future demand. In practice though, improving crop growth management through better technology and knowledge almost inevitably goes along with (1) improving farm management with increased cropping intensity and more annual harvests where feasible and (2) an economically more efficient spatial allocation of crops which maximizes farmers' profit. By explicitly considering these two factors we show that, without expansion of cropland, today's global biomass potentials substantially exceed previous estimates and even 2050s' demands. We attribute 39% increase in estimated global production potentials to increasing cropping intensities and 30% to the spatial reallocation of crops to their profit-maximizing locations. The additional potentials would make cropland expansion redundant. Their geographic distribution points at possible hotspots for future intensification.

Addressing future trade-offs between biodiversity and cropland expansion to improve food security

“…In order to ensure sufficient food supply in the coming decades, several solutions are suggested. Besides reducing food waste and harvest losses, improving food distribution and access, and shifting diets towards consumption of fewer meat and dairy products, studies conclude that also the increase in global agricultural production is crucially important to meet the increasing demand (Garnett et al 2013;Godfray et al 2010;Gregory and George 2011;Gustavsson et al 2011;Mauser et al 2015). At the same time, agricultural yields as well as production stability are affected by climate change, albeit study results vary between different approaches and assumptions Rosenzweig et al 2013;van Ittersum et al 2013).…”

A global approach to estimate irrigated areas – a comparison between different data and statistics

“…We decided on the high spatial resolution of 30 arcsec (approx. 1 km 2 at the Equator), since the demand for high-resolution global data is increasing in different applications (Deryng et al, 2016;Jägermeyr et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2007;Mauser et al, 2015;Rosenzweig et al, 2014) and the pixel size of approximately 1 km 2 is already close to the size of large fields (depending on the region) or an agglomeration of smaller irrigated fields. For Africa and Asia, the field size of 1 km 2 might be too large (Fritz et al, 2015), but usually, irrigated fields can be much bigger in size, since irrigation is often applied by large-scale farms.…”

Soil Moisture Retrieval Based on GPS Signal Strength Attenuation

“…The hydrologic land-surface PROcesses of Mass and Energy Transfer (PROMET) model is physically based and describes all relevant water and energy fluxes [8,39,47]. We modelled at a point scale and in an hourly resolution all relevant hydrological parameters for the DWD test site Munich.…”

“…However, until now it is still difficult to measure surface SM accurately. As climate and hydrological model approaches make use of information on the soil, an improvement in SM monitoring can help to reduce uncertainties in the simulation of climate change forecasting, extreme events, ecosystems as well as agriculture and food production [4,[8][9][10].…”