Author, as appears in the article.: Duro JA; Lauk C; Kastner T; Erb KH; Haberl H
Department: Economia
URV's Author/s: Duro Moreno, Juan Antonio
Keywords: Yield Year-2000 Sustainable intensification Population Patterns Land-use intensity Land-use efficiency Inequality Human appropriation Food supply Cropland demand
Abstract: © 2020 The Authors The world population is expected to rise to 9.7 billion by 2050 and to ~11 billion by 2100, and securing its healthy nutrition is a key concern. As global fertile land is limited, the question arises whether growth in food consumption associated with increased affluence surmounts increases in land-use efficiency (measured as food supply per cropland area) associated with technological progress. Furthermore, substantial inequalities prevail in the global food system: While overly rich diets represent a serious health issue for many of the world's most affluent inhabitants and constitute a critical climate-change driver, undernourishment and hunger still threaten a considerable fraction of the world population, mostly in low-income countries. We here analyze trajectories in cropland demand and their main basic drivers food consumption (measured by a food index reflecting the share of animal products in diets) and land-use efficiency, for 123 countries (clustered in four income groups, covering 94% of the world population). We cover the period 1990–2013 and assess if these trajectories are associated with changes in inequality between countries. We find that while all groups of countries converged towards the high level of the per-capita food consumption of high-income countries, differences between income groups remained pronounced. Overall, cropland demand per capita declined over the entire period in all regions except low income countries, resulting in a tendency towards global convergence. However, the trend slowed in the last years. In contrast, land-use efficiency increased in all income groups with a similar trend, hence international inequalites in land-use efficiency remained almost unaltered. Because population and food requirements per capita are expected to grow in all income groups except the richest ones, failure to improve land efficiency sufficiently could lead to a less unequal but at the same time less ecologically sustainable world. Avoiding such outcomes may be possible by reducing the consumption of animal products in the richer countries and raising land-use efficiency in the poorer countries.
Thematic Areas: Sociologia i política Saúde coletiva Planejamento urbano e regional / demografia Management, monitoring, policy and law Interdisciplinar Global and planetary change Geography, planning and development Geography Geografía Geociências General o multidisciplinar Environmental studies Environmental sciences Engenharias iii Ecology Ciencias sociales Ciências ambientais Ciências agrárias i Biotecnología Biodiversidade
licence for use: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/
Author's mail: juanantonio.duro@urv.cat
Author identifier: 0000-0002-1106-5251
Record's date: 2024-07-27
Papper version: info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Licence document URL: https://repositori.urv.cat/ca/proteccio-de-dades/
Papper original source: Global Environmental Change-Human And Policy Dimensions. 64
APA: Duro JA; Lauk C; Kastner T; Erb KH; Haberl H (2020). Global inequalities in food consumption, cropland demand and land-use efficiency: A decomposition analysis. Global Environmental Change-Human And Policy Dimensions, 64(), -. DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102124
Entity: Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Journal publication year: 2020
Publication Type: Journal Publications
Repositori URV