Avoiding an unjust transition to sustainability: An equity metric for spatial conservation planning.

The need for rapid and ambitious conservation and restoration is widely acknowledged, yet concern exists that the widespread reallocation of land to nature would disproportionately affect the world's poor. Conservation and restoration may limit nutrition and livelihood options and thus negatively affect social development objectives. Although much research looks into global-scale scenarios and planning of conservation and restoration, spatial evaluations of these trade-offs in terms of equity remain limited. We fill this gap by identifying areas where conservation or restoration under different future scenarios and prioritization maps expand nature into landscapes that likely support land-dependent communities in their local food security. By contrasting the expansion of nature into areas supporting land-dependent communities vs. places where the food system is supported by regional to global markets, we highlight the need for disaggregated indicators that reflect the diversity of human land-use needs in order to identify more equitable pathways. Conservation prioritizations were found to result in more equitable land-use outcomes than the land-use outcomes of widely used socioeconomic scenarios. Accounting for differentiated social impacts in model-based conservation and restoration planning and global scale scenario assessment can help achieve a more inclusive transition to sustainability as well as reduce barriers to meaningful change.

The Activities of the Slovenian Strategic Council for Nutrition 2023/24 to Improve the Health of the Slovenian Population and the Sustainability of Food: A Narrative Review.

The health status of individuals in Slovenia across age groups is a matter of concern, as current unsustainable lifestyle choices are already leading to various chronic noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Outdated national dietary guidelines, their inconsistent implementation, and a lack of structural changes represent obstacles to promoting healthy and sustainable nutrition. Limited access to and rising prices of healthy, sustainable foods, in addition to the high availability of low-priced, highly processed foods, increase the risk of NCDs. The lack of systematic health monitoring and early disease detection poses a challenge. Global and local environmental issues, resistance, and/or the inability to adopt healthier diets hinder individuals from changing their nutritional behaviours. In this narrative review, we provide an overview of the current situation in Slovenia as well as planned activities initiated by the Slovenian government and the Prime Minister's Strategic Council for Nutrition, aiming to make progress in supporting healthy and sustainable nutrition, limiting food waste, and increasing the availability of healthier foods for all. Improving the sustainability of the Slovenian food system can contribute to several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ensuring Slovenia's commitment to internationally agreed-upon targets. This could lead Slovenia to take a role as a pilot country in testing and implementing the necessary systemic changes, which could be further applied in other countries.

Global forest management data for 2015 at a 100 m resolution.

Spatially explicit information on forest management at a global scale is critical for understanding the status of forests, for planning sustainable forest management and restoration, and conservation activities. Here, we produce the first reference data set and a prototype of a globally consistent forest management map with high spatial detail on the most prevalent forest management classes such as intact forests, managed forests with natural regeneration, planted forests, plantation forest (rotation up to 15 years), oil palm plantations, and agroforestry. We developed the reference dataset of 226 K unique locations through a series of expert and crowdsourcing campaigns using Geo-Wiki ( https://www.geo-wiki.org/ ). We then combined the reference samples with time series from PROBA-V satellite imagery to create a global wall-to-wall map of forest management at a 100 m resolution for the year 2015, with forest management class accuracies ranging from 58% to 80%. The reference data set and the map present the status of forest ecosystems and can be used for investigating the value of forests for species, ecosystems and their services.

Representing responses to climate change in spatial land system models.

Modelling future change to land use and land cover is done as part of many local and global scenario environmental assessments. Nevertheless, there are still considerable challenges related to simulating land-use responses to climate change. Mostly, climate change is considered by changing the temperature and precipitation, affecting the spatial distribution and productivity of future land use and land cover as result of differential changes in growing conditions. Other climate change effects, such as changes in the water resources needed to support future cropland expansion and intensification, are often neglected. In this study, we demonstrate how including different types of responses to climate change influences the simulation of future changes to land use and land cover, and land management. We study the influence of including different climate change effects in land system modeling step by step. The results show that land system models need to include numerous simultaneous climate change effects, particularly when looking at adaptation options such as implementing irrigation. Otherwise, there is a risk of biased impact estimates leading either to under- or overestimation of the consequences of land use change, including land degradation. Spatial land system models therefore need to be developed accounting for a multitude of climate change impacts, uncertainties related to climate data, and an assessment of the sensitivity of the outcomes toward the decisions of modellers on representing climate change impacts.

The Impact of Accounting for Future Wood Production in Global Vertebrate Biodiversity Assessments.

Forests are among the most species rich habitats and the way they are managed influences their capacity to protect biodiversity. To fulfill increasing wood demands in the future, planted and non-planted wood production will need to expand. While biodiversity assessments usually focus on the impacts of deforestation, the effects of wood harvest are mostly not considered, especially not in a spatially explicit manner. We present here a global approach to refine the representation of forest management through allocating future wood production to planted and non-planted forests. Wood production, following wood consumption projections of three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, was allocated using likelihood maps for planted and production forests. On a global scale, plantations for wood production were projected to increase by 45-65% and harvested area in non-planted forests by 1-17%. The biodiversity impacts of changes in wood production patterns were estimated by applying two commonly used indicators: (1) changes in species richness and (2) changes in habitat-suitable ranges of single species. The impact was analyzed using forest cover changes as reference. Our results show that, although forest cover changes have the largest impact on biodiversity, changes in wood production also have a significant effect. The magnitude of impacts caused by changes of wood production substantially differs by region and taxa. Given the importance of forest production changes in net negative emission pathways, more focus should be put on assessing the effects of future changes in wood production patterns as part of overall land use change impacts.

Adaptations in irrigated agriculture in the Mediterranean region: an overview and spatial analysis of implemented strategies.

In order to meet future food demand while sustainably managing available land and water resources, irrigated agriculture in semi-arid regions needs to adapt as a response to climate and socio-economic change. In this study, we focus on the Mediterranean region, a dynamic region, which is highly dependent on irrigated agriculture. We provide insight on adaptation strategies implemented on farm level, by doing a systematic review of studies in the region. Our analysis reports 286 implemented adaptations, on 124 different locations throughout the Mediterranean. Additionally, 142 drivers and 324 effects of adaptations were noted. We identified 31 adaptation strategies in 5 main categories: (1) water management, (2) sustainable resource management, (3) technological developments, (4) farm production practices, and (5) farm management. Strategies in the categories water management and farm production practices are most often implemented by farmers in the region. The main driver in the area is water scarcity and adaptations often affected water use and resources in addition to farm practices. Subsequently, we studied the spatial context of adaptations by analyzing the location factors of the five main strategies, using Geographic Information Systems and maximum entropy modeling. Our results show that farmers are more likely to adapt in less rural areas with lower poverty values and better market access, and in areas with higher temperatures and less rainfall. This demonstrates that both biophysical and socio-economic factors determine the context in which adaptations are implemented and that considerable spatial variability in the area exists.

Estimating the global distribution of field size using crowdsourcing.

There is an increasing evidence that smallholder farms contribute substantially to food production globally, yet spatially explicit data on agricultural field sizes are currently lacking. Automated field size delineation using remote sensing or the estimation of average farm size at subnational level using census data are two approaches that have been used. However, both have limitations, for example, automatic field size delineation using remote sensing has not yet been implemented at a global scale while the spatial resolution is very coarse when using census data. This paper demonstrates a unique approach to quantifying and mapping agricultural field size globally using crowdsourcing. A campaign was run in June 2017, where participants were asked to visually interpret very high resolution satellite imagery from Google Maps and Bing using the Geo-Wiki application. During the campaign, participants collected field size data for 130 K unique locations around the globe. Using this sample, we have produced the most accurate global field size map to date and estimated the percentage of different field sizes, ranging from very small to very large, in agricultural areas at global, continental, and national levels. The results show that smallholder farms occupy up to 40% of agricultural areas globally, which means that, potentially, there are many more smallholder farms in comparison with the two different current global estimates of 12% and 24%. The global field size map and the crowdsourced data set are openly available and can be used for integrated assessment modeling, comparative studies of agricultural dynamics across different contexts, for training and validation of remote sensing field size delineation, and potential contributions to the Sustainable Development Goal of Ending hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

Adaptation of land management in the Mediterranean under scenarios of irrigation water use and availability.

Meeting the growing demand for food in the future will require adaptation of water and land management to future conditions. We studied the extent of different adaptation options to future global change in the Mediterranean region, under scenarios of water use and availability. We focused on the most significant adaptation options for semiarid regions: implementing irrigation, changes to cropland intensity, and diversification of cropland activities. We used Conversion of Land Use on Mondial Scale (CLUMondo), a global land system model, to simulate future change to land use and land cover, and land management. To take into account future global change, we followed global outlooks for future population and climate change, and crop and livestock demand. The results indicate that the level of irrigation efficiency improvement is an important determinant of potential changes in the intensity of rain-fed land systems. No or low irrigation efficiency improvements lead to a reduction in irrigated areas, accompanied with intensification and expansion of rain-fed cropping systems. When reducing water withdrawal, total crop production in intensive rain-fed systems would need to increase significantly: by 130% without improving the irrigation efficiency in irrigated systems and by 53% under conditions of the highest possible efficiency improvement. In all scenarios, traditional Mediterranean multifunctional land systems continue to play a significant role in food production, especially in hosting livestock. Our results indicate that significant improvements to irrigation efficiency with simultaneous increase in cropland productivity are needed to satisfy future demands for food in the region. The approach can be transferred to other similar regions with strong resource limitations in terms of land and water.

A global reference database of crowdsourced cropland data collected using the Geo-Wiki platform.

A global reference data set on cropland was collected through a crowdsourcing campaign using the Geo-Wiki crowdsourcing tool. The campaign lasted three weeks, with over 80 participants from around the world reviewing almost 36,000 sample units, focussing on cropland identification. For quality assessment purposes, two additional data sets are provided. The first is a control set of 1,793 sample locations validated by students trained in satellite image interpretation. This data set was used to assess the quality of the crowd as the campaign progressed. The second data set contains 60 expert validations for additional evaluation of the quality of the contributions. All data sets are split into two parts: the first part shows all areas classified as cropland and the second part shows cropland average per location and user. After further processing, the data presented here might be suitable to validate and compare medium and high resolution cropland maps generated using remote sensing. These could also be used to train classification algorithms for developing new maps of land cover and cropland extent.

Future Forest Cover Change Scenarios with Implications for Landslide Risk: An Example from Buzau Subcarpathians, Romania.

This study focuses on future forest cover change in Buzau Subcarpathians, a landslide prone region in Romania. Past and current trends suggest that the area might expect a future increase in deforestation. We developed spatially explicit scenarios until 2040 to analyze the spatial pattern of future forest cover change and potential changes to landslide risk. First, we generated transition probability maps using the weights of evidence method, followed by a cellular automata allocation model. We performed expert interviews, to develop two future forest management scenarios. The Alternative scenario (ALT) was defined by 67% more deforestation than the Business as Usual scenario (BAU). We integrated the simulated scenarios with a landslide susceptibility map. In both scenarios, most of deforestation was projected in areas where landslides are less likely to occur. Still, 483 (ALT) and 276 (BAU) ha of deforestation were projected on areas with a high-landslide occurrence likelihood. Thus, deforestation could lead to a local-scale increase in landslide risk, in particular near or adjacent to forestry roads. The parallel process of near 10% forest expansion until 2040 was projected to occur mostly on areas with high-landslide susceptibility. On a regional scale, forest expansion could so result in improved slope stability. We modeled two additional scenarios with an implemented landslide risk policy, excluding high-risk zones. The reduction of deforestation on high-risk areas was achieved without a drastic decrease in the accessibility of the areas. Together with forest expansion, it could therefore be used as a risk reduction strategy.