Fig 1.
Schematic overview of the three different land saving strategies biophysical land saving (BLS), uniform land saving (ULS) and socio-economic land saving (SLS).
The strategies differ in their assumptions on maintaining current cropping patterns (BLS, ULS) versus their change towards profit-optimized cropping patterns (SLS), and the spatial implementation of land saving at locations with the lowest yields (BLS), uniformly across the region at high- and low-yielding locations (ULS), or the least profitable locations (SLS).
Fig 2.
Global land saving potentials.
The land saving potential [%] describes the percentage share of cropland that could be taken out of production on the total global cropland area. (a) Global land saving potential for the three different land saving strategies, biophysical land saving (BLS), socio-economic land saving (SLS) and uniform land saving (ULS), further disaggregated into crop categories. (b) Global land saving potential for each crop category as a percentage share of the crop-specific global cropland. For the different crop categories, the following abbreviations are used (Table in S2 Appendix): cb: sugar cane & sugar beet; gron: rest of cereal grains; mze: maize; osdn: rest of oil seeds; pdr: paddy rice; plm: oil palm; rsd: rapeseed; soy: soy; wht: wheat.
Fig 3.
Regional potentials of land saving (a) and resulting regional effects on agricultural markets in terms of changes in crop prices (b) and production (c) for each land saving strategy. Land saving potentials [%] describes the percentage share of cropland that could be taken out of production relative to the total regional cropland across all crop categories. The relative changes in prices and production [%] refer to a baseline without the implementation of land saving.
Fig 4.
Land saving potentials and their resulting changes in production (a) and prices (b) aggregated over all crop categories for each region. The sizes of the dots reflect current statistical cropland area over all considered crop categories, while the colors of the dots display the different land saving strategies biophysical land saving (BLS), socio-economic land saving (SLS) and uniform land saving (ULS). For the abbreviations and further information on the regions of the analysis, see S3 Appendix.
Fig 5.
Differences between the land saving strategies in their correlation with current yield gaps and their land saving potential.
(a) Regional yield gaps [%] accumulated over all crops and associated regional land saving potential [% of cropland] for biophysical land saving (BLS), socio-economic land saving (SLS) and uniform land saving (ULS). The yield gap is defined as the percentage difference between statistical and potential yields. (b) Change in global land saving potential in percentage points (pp) for each crop category compared to the BLS as upper benchmark for realizable land saving. For the different crop categories, the following abbreviations are used (Table in S2 Appendix): cb: sugar cane & sugar beet; gron: rest of cereal grains; mze: maize; osdn: rest of oil seeds; pdr: paddy rice; plm: oil palm; rsd: rapeseed; soy: soy; wht: wheat. For the abbreviations and further information on the regions of the analysis, see S3 Appendix.
Fig 6.
Graphical summary of identified regional effects and implications of land saving.
Different identified effects are displayed exemplarily for the most dynamic regions. The underlying global map shows the biophysical land saving potential (BLS) in percentage of total cropland (summed up over all considered crops according to Monfreda et al. [115], see S2 Appendix) for each sub-region. As land saving can only be implemented on current cropland areas, land that is currently not used as cropland is masked out. The thick region lines show the aggregated 17 study regions (see S3 Appendix), while the country boarders are displayed according to the global administrative areas of GADM version 2.8. Reprinted from GADM (https://gadm.org/) under a CC BY license, with permission from GADM, original copyright 2012.