Exploring the role of agricultural trade in the future of nature and people

Abstract

Agricultural trade was an important driver of habitat and biodiversity loss in the recent decades (Chaudhary & Kastner 2016). Yet, it might also have increased land use efficiency and the net biodiversity impacts are heterogeneous across regions, commodities and spatial scales (Kastner et al. 2021, Roux et al. 2021). Trade greening is identified as a key leverage point to reverse global biodiversity declines (Chan et al. 2020), and future trade could be deeply affected by the food system sustainability transition needed to reach ambitious goals for climate, biodiversity and people (Leclère et al. 2020). To explore uncertainties in the co-evolution of agricultural trade and biodiversity in the coming decades, we used the GLOBIOM partial equilibrium model of the agricultural, forestry, bioenergy and aquaculture sectors (Havlík et al. 2014) to quantify a set of scenarios.

A first scenario dimension contrasted a future baseline prolongating historical trends (Middle of the Road Shared Socioeconomic Pathway SSP2, Popp et al. 2016) with additional efforts towards bending the curve of global biodiversity loss (Leclère et al. 2020) including increased conservation and restoration alone, or cumulated with a faster convergence of agricultural yields, reduced waste and increased share of plant-based products in diets. These scenarios are first combined with the standard SSP2 trade setup, and then combined with three alternative future trade variants as a second scenario dimension (Enhanced trade liberalization, Frictions and reconfigurations, Trade greening).

Preliminary results showed positive future socio-economic impacts and negative future environmental impacts in a scenario prolongating historical trends. Assuming an exacerbated liberalization worsened environmental impacts for mixed effects on socio-economic indicators, while trade frictions & reconfiguration would have mild environmental gains and negative socio-economic impacts as compared to the baseline. Trade Greening could have moderate positive impacts on all metrics as compared to the baseline. Relatively high levels of future increases in trade flows were found despite lower environmental impacts when assuming additional conservation and supply-side efforts. However, assuming additional demand-side efforts was more disruptive, with much larger environmental gains and food security risk reduction as compared to the baseline, but also much smaller future increases in agricultural value added and trade flows.

References:

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