Future Agricultural Workforce Availability as a Constraint on the Northward Expansion of Cultivable Land

Under ongoing climate change, high-latitude regions are becoming increasingly suitable for agricultural production, while climate-related risks to food systems are intensifying in many low-latitude regions. Accordingly, the northward expansion of cultivable land has been analyzed as a mitigation buffer for climate change and global food security. However, such expansion raises concerns regarding land-use competition with forestry and the encroachment on forests, soils, and peatlands that takes important roles in the terrestrial carbon cycle. Therefore, the proposition of a practical northern front that defines actually utilizable cropland potential is necessary to enable further analysis of these inherent issues. In this study, we assess the practical northern front under constraints imposed by agricultural workforce availability, used as a proxy for complex socio-economic interactions. The northern front of cultivable land is projected based on a data driven framework that integrates historical trajectories of agricultural employment with demographic assumptions from the SSP narratives. In contrast to the pronounced northward expansion of environmentally suitable land, the projected practical cultivable land area exhibits limited expansion. Under the SSP3 scenario, for instance, a southward retreat of the practical cultivable frontier is identified across Central Asia and the Far Eastern region. In Europe (50–90°N), most environmentally suitable areas remain practically cultivable, whereas in North America, agricultural workforce rarely extends beyond 50°N, except in a few localized regions. These results point to limitations in climate and food security mitigation strategies relying on high-latitude land expansion, while indicating that challenges in low-latitude agricultural systems persist.

Acknowledgment: This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (RS-2021-NR055516, RS-2025-02312954).