As human populations continue to grow, so does demand for food and the land needed to produce it. Yet, land-use change is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity and agricultural activity is its leading driver. In sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture is expected to develop particularly quickly in coming decades, as governments aim to eliminate hunger while conserving biodiversity (in line with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2 and 15). This means that there are trade-offs to manage, to: increase cropland, prevent biodiversity loss, and improve economies and social equality.
As part of the interdisciplinary ‘Social and Environmental Trade-offs in African Agriculture’ (SENTINEL) project, we have been assessing the potential impacts of agricultural development on wildlife and people in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia. Harnessing the power of open-access, global-scale datasets and spatial-analysis tools, we aimed to identify whether crops consumed in-country (‘domestic crops’) and/or those sold internationally (‘traded crops’) could be trading off with biodiversity in each of these countries. We sought to map ‘trade-off risk areas’ to aid conservation and land-use management decisions. This is the first analysis to use global-scale data on specific crops to map regional trade-off risk associated with food production and biodiversity.
Results/Conclusions
We find that both domestic and traded crops coincide with land rich in vertebrate species, including species categorized as ‘threatened’ using the IUCN Red List, and areas prioritized globally for their conservation importance (e.g. Global 200 ecoregions, with which ~70% of domestic and traded crop areas overlap in Ethiopia and Zambia). This overlap, identified across Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia, highlights a risk of trade-off between food production and biodiversity, and this is likely to intensify in the future, given recent land-use change (mapped using European Space Agency satellite imagery) and production and consumption trends. The trade-off risk varies by crop and by country. For instance, while the strongest trade-off risk is associated with traded crops in Ethiopia, domestic crops pose the highest trade-off risks in Ghana and Zambia (e.g. Manihot esculenta - cassava). The crop- and country-specific nature of our results emphasizes a need for policy-appropriate and country-specific strategies for achieving SDGs to safeguard biodiversity in an era of agricultural development.