Land‐use strategies to balance livestock production, biodiversity conservation and carbon storage in Yucatán, Mexico

Abstract

Balancing the production of food, particularly meat, with preserving biodiversity and maintaining ecosystem services is a major societal challenge. Research into the contrasting strategies of land sparing and land sharing has suggested that land sparing-combining high-yield agriculture with the protection or restoration of natural habitats on nonfarmed land-will have lower environmental impacts than other strategies. Ecosystems with long histories of habitat disturbance, however, could be resilient to low-yield agriculture and thus fare better under land sharing. Using a wider suite of species (birds, dung beetles and trees) and a wider range of livestock-production systems than previous studies, we investigated the probable impacts of different land-use strategies on biodiversity and aboveground carbon stocks in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico-a region with a long history of habitat disturbance. By modelling the production of multiple products from interdependent land uses, we found that land sparing would allow larger estimated populations of most species and larger carbon stocks to persist than would land sharing or any intermediate strategy. This result held across all agricultural production targets despite the history of disturbance and despite species richness in low- and medium-yielding agriculture being not much lower than that in natural habitats. This highlights the importance, in evaluating the biodiversity impacts of land use, of measuring population densities of individual species, rather than simple species richness. The benefits of land sparing for both biodiversity and carbon storage suggest that safeguarding natural habitats for biodiversity protection and carbon storage alongside promoting areas of high-yield cattle production would be desirable. However, delivering such landscapes will probably require the explicit linkage of livestock yield increases with habitat protection or restoration, as well as a deeper understanding of the long-term sustainability of yields, and research into how other societal outcomes vary across land-use strategies.

What Have We Learned from the Land Sparing-sharing Model?

“…This is true for birds and trees in the Upper Guinea forests of Ghana [2], birds and trees in the Upper Gangetic Plain of India [2], birds in Uganda's banana-coffee arc [3], birds and dung beetles in the Colombian Chocó-Andes [4], birds in the Kazakhstan steppe [5], birds in the Pampas grasslands of Brazil and Uruguay [6], and birds, trees and dung beetles in the Yucatán, Mexico [7]. It is especially true for species with small global ranges, which are often those of most conservation concern.…”

“…But while Phalan et al [10] described land sparing as a way to minimise the inevitable harm of food production, ecomodernists are more positive, and view decoupling as a pathway towards a "good Anthropocene". Those using the land sparing-sharing framework see reductions in consumption as an important part of the solution [2,7,50], whereas ecomodernists do not. Those using the sparing-sharing framework are agnostic about how yields should be increased, and welcome initiatives involving farmer knowledge networks and ecological intensification; ecomodernists focus almost exclusively on modern, technological solutions [51].…”

“…The original formulation of the land sparing-sharing framework omits some complexities, but it can be and already has been modified to incorporate many of these, including spatial configuration and the influence of edge effects [60,61]; the influence of changing diets and reducing food waste [50]; inclusion of some ecosystem services [4,7,50,62]; prediction of the effects of specific public policies [63]; and application to forestry [64,65], urban planning [66][67][68][69] and marine conservation [70]. It is a model, and so all assumptions can be varied and tested.…”

“…However, any conclusions they draw about the merits of sparing and sharing from the shape of curves with species richness on the Y axis, for example, are unreliable. Here, I focus on what we have learned from studies that used the land sparing-sharing model proposed by Green et al [1], or which modified it [4,7] while adhering to the critical points mentioned above.…”

“…Since the publication of the model in 2005, it has been applied to field data from Ghana, India, Uganda, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Kazakhstan and Colombia [2][3][4][5][6][7]. These empirical, place-based papers, however, have been outnumbered by reviews and other conceptual papers, some positive, Ecological intensification refers to actions that replace anthropogenic inputs or increase yields by harnessing ecosystem services [38].…”