| 1. |
- Kastner, Thomas, et al.
(författare)
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Global agricultural trade and land system sustainability: Implications for ecosystem carbon storage, biodiversity, and human nutrition
- 2021
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Ingår i: One Earth. - : Elsevier BV. - 2590-3322 .- 2590-3330. ; 4:10, s. 1425-1443
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Global land systems are increasingly shaped by international trade of agricultural products. An increasing number of studies have quantified the implications of agricultural trade for single different aspects of land system sustainability. Bringing together studies across different sustainability dimensions, this review inves-tigates how global agricultural trade flows have affected land systems and resulting impacts on food and nutrient availability, natural habitat conversion, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem carbon storage. We show that the effects of trade on land systems are highly heterogeneous across regions and commodities, revealing both synergies and trade-offs between improved nutrition and environmental conservation. For instance, we find that while the concentration of cereal production in North America has spared land, the increased demand for tropical products induced by trade has negatively impacted tropical ecosystems. Based on the current state of knowledge, we identify six pathways for how future research can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how agricultural trade can positively contribute to meeting global sustainability goals.
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| 2. |
- Laroche, Perrine C.S.J., et al.
(författare)
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Accounting for trade in derived products when estimating European Union's role in driving deforestation
- 2024
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Ingår i: Ecological Economics. - 0921-8009. ; 224
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Governments across the world are increasingly seeking to ensure that the products consumed in their countries meet certain sustainability standards. However, the places of production—where major impacts occur—are often distant from the places of consumption. Physical trade models are suited to estimate the link between consumption and production impacts for individual commodities, but often ignore trade in derived products, obtained by processing primary commodities, especially for non-food products. Derived products which are manufactured using multiple primary commodities, such as shoes containing leather, rubber, as well as other textile materials, pose a special challenge for these models. This can lead to biased assessments of sustainability risks and obscure leverage points to address them. To mitigate the risk of bias, here we present an approach for assessing the importance of accounting for trade in derived products when attributing impacts. We apply the approach to trade in rubber and bovine hide products and associated deforestation to assess the coverage of relevant products included in the European Union (EU) regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR), as well as to inform future revisions of the regulation's scope. We consider trade flows for 135 types of rubber products and 37 types of products derived from bovine hides. We find that rubber and bovine hides enter the EU at different stages of the supply chain. While natural rubber enters the EU at an early processing stage, through imports of raw natural rubber, most products derived from bovine hides enter the EU either as processed products or as consumer goods. Our results thus highlight that depending on the product, the share of total deforestation attributed to the EU's consumption could be significantly affected by choices in which derived products are accounted for. Weighting the costs and benefits of the inclusion of derived products for each commodity is therefore key to designing demand-side policies that cost-effectively and successfully address the deforestation risk associated with consumption.
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| 3. |
- Rall, Bjoern C., et al.
(författare)
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Universal temperature and body-mass scaling of feeding rates
- 2012
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Ingår i: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. - : The Royal Society. - 1471-2970 .- 0962-8436. ; 367:1605, s. 2923-2934
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Knowledge of feeding rates is the basis to understand interaction strength and subsequently the stability of ecosystems and biodiversity. Feeding rates, as all biological rates, depend on consumer and resource body masses and environmental temperature. Despite five decades of research on functional responses as quantitative models of feeding rates, a unifying framework of how they scale with body masses and temperature is still lacking. This is perplexing, considering that the strength of functional responses (i.e. interaction strengths) is crucially important for the stability of simple consumer-resource systems and the persistence, sustainability and biodiversity of complex communities. Here, we present the largest currently available database on functional response parameters and their scaling with body mass and temperature. Moreover, these data are integrated across ecosystems and metabolic types of species. Surprisingly, we found general temperature dependencies that differed from the Arrhenius terms predicted by metabolic models. Additionally, the body-mass-scaling relationships were more complex than expected and differed across ecosystems and metabolic types. At local scales (taxonomically narrow groups of consumer-resource pairs), we found hump-shaped deviations from the temperature and body-mass-scaling relationships. Despite the complexity of our results, these body-mass-and temperature-scaling models remain useful as a mechanistic basis for predicting the consequences of warming for interaction strengths, population dynamics and network stability across communities differing in their size structure.
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