Boosting natural capital

Two of the first volumes this year of the Proceedings B of the Royal Society have been dedicated to the issue of sustainable agriculture, signalling researchers’ concerns about the urgent need to address this issue. The editors, Chris Pollock, Jules Pretty, Ian Crute, Chris Leaver and Howard Dalton, highlight issues that continue to fail to impact more widely. And they are blunt in their assessment of the upcoming challenges. There has been an extraordinary boom in agricultural production over recent decades but this is likely to be unsustainable. And the recent soaring prices for basic food commodities in the face of poor harvests and rising global demand add weight to the issues raised. Pressure on land, both nationally and globally, will increase for at least the next half century, they write. Despite rapid shifts in human fertility patterns, population growth will result in the world population rising by at least another two billion to a maximum of 8.5–9 billion by 2045–2050. But there is no smoothness to these projected changes. “Projections of climate change impacts suggest that there will be significant negative impacts on crop and animal production, particularly in the subtropics and tropics. At the same time, demand for animal products in developing countries is growing so fast that an extra 300 million tonnes of grain will be needed by 2050 to meet this need alone.” And water resources are under increasing pressure and shifting availability. Urban and industrial water use is reducing water availability for agriculture in many regions, and harvesting solar energy for biofuels and industrial feedstocks will further reduce land available for food production. “In our view, this means that agriculture in the twenty-first century will have to be very different from agriculture in the twentieth century and this, in turn, will require a radical approach to the investment in and application of research.”