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Reconciling Food Production and Biodiversity Conservation: Land Sharing and Land Sparing Compared
Abstract
The question of how to meet rising food demand at the least cost to biodiversity requires the evaluation of two contrasting alternatives: land sharing, which integrates both objectives on the same land; and land sparing, in which high-yield farming is combined with protecting natural habitats from conversion to agriculture. To test these alternatives, we compared crop yields and densities of bird and tree species across gradients of agricultural intensity in southwest Ghana and northern India. More species were negatively affected by agriculture than benefited from it, particularly among species with small global ranges. For both taxa in both countries, land sparing is a more promising strategy for minimizing negative impacts of food production, at both current and anticipated future levels of production.
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Published In
Science
Volume 333 | Issue 6047
2 September 2011
2 September 2011
Copyright
Copyright © 2011, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 23 May 2011
Accepted: 22 July 2011
Published in print: 2 September 2011
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments: We thank the farmers, plantation managers, forest officials, local guides/assistants, and others who made fieldwork in Ghana (B.P.) and India (M.O.) possible. In Ghana, we particularly thank P. Ekpe, K. Dua, the Ghana Wildlife Society, the Forestry Commission, and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. In India, we particularly thank the Uttarakhand Forest Department, G. B. Pant University, and the Wildlife Institute of India. For assistance with data, we are grateful to S. Jayson. B.P. received funding from the Robert Gardiner Memorial Trust, St. John’s College, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Isaac Newton Trust, the United Nations Environment Programme–World Conservation Monitoring Centre, a Domestic Research Studentship, the British Ornithologists’ Union, the Smuts Memorial Fund, and the Cambridge Philosophical Society, and was supported by a Sackler research fellowship at Churchill College. M.O. received funding from a Dorothy Hodgkin Scholarship, the UK Natural Environment Research Council, the Tim Whitmore Fund, and the S. T. Lee Fund. Data on species, model coefficients, and sample sizes are provided in the supporting online material.
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