Metadata
Title: Projected Land Conservation Impacts on Global Soil Erosion and Pollination Sufficiency
Description: We combine the open-source land-system model MAgPIE (Model of Agricultural Production and its Impact on the Environment) with the Spatial Economic Allocation Landscape Simulator (SEALS) and the Global Soil Erosion Modelling (GloSEM) platform to assess how different land conservation measures focused on climate and biodiversity protection could drive changes in soil loss by water erosion, pollination and landscape heterogeneity.
MAgPIE utilizes a cost-optimization approach to simulate the dynamics of the global land system throughout the 21st century. It integrates a wide range of socio-economic and spatially explicit biophysical information from the LPJmL model, which includes data on yield patterns, water availability, and carbon stocks. This information is represented at a resolution of 0.5 degrees, which corresponds to approximately 55 km × 55 km at the equator. The SEALS model downscales the simulated land-cover changes derived from MAgPIE to a finer spatial resolution of 10 arc seconds (equivalent to approximately 300 m × 300 m at the equator). The downscaling is driven by adjacency relationships, physical suitability, and conversion eligibility.
Modelled scenarios: We compare a "business-as-usual" (BAU) scenario with three different land-system interventions aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (GBF).
- The BAU scenario represents the reference case, following the "middle-of-the-road" shared socioeconomic pathway for land use sector (SSP2). It considers moderate population and income growth, along with currently implemented land conservation policies.
- The PROTECT scenario focuses on area-based conservation action, aiming to protect 30% of the land surface in conservation priority areas (Biodiversity Hotspots and Intact Forest Landscapes) by 2030 in line with the GBF.
- The COACTION scenario combines ambitious action for carbon-focused land restoration in line with the Paris Agreement and area-based conservation action.
- In the MULTI scenario we add a quantitative target to conserve at least 20% of semi-natural habitat in agricultural landscapes to the previous interventions, in order to conserve biodiversity and to support crucial ecosystem functions in agroecosystems.
Main findings:
- Important synergies exist between carbon uptake on land and soil erosion by water. Land-based climate mitigation caused a 75% reduction of soil loss at the global scale as compared to a reference scenario without climate action.
- Despite clearly reducing soil loss in historical cropland landscapes, the results also show that the landscape policy intervention of the MULTI scenario could lead to slightly higher overall soil loss as compared to the COACTION scenario. This is the result of cropland relocation to areas with a higher susceptibility to water erosion due to the restrictions at the landscape scale.
- At the global scale, pollination supply and landscape heterogeneity were further decreased in the BAU and PROTECT scenario and did not improve in the COACTION scenario. However, the results also show that conserving at least 20% of permanent habitats would lead to more diverse landscapes with a higher supply of key nature’s contributions to people (NCP) without additional net carbon losses, primary land conversion or reductions in agricultural productivity.
Pixel size: 300m.
Measurement Unit: t ha-1 yr-1 (for soil erosion) - Values in the range of 0 - 1 for Pollination sufficiency
Projection: WGS_1984
Temporal coverage: 2015 and 2050 (future projections)
More information: Global Soil Erosion
External information: Press release of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Data
Global Soil Erosion data
The data includes the spatially-explicit soil loss estimates for all scenarios (shown in Fig. 7 of the paper) and the R code used to process the input data.Changes in soil loss by water erosion are used as a measure for soil degradation and estimated based on the Global Soil Erosion Modelling (GloSEM) platform (Borrelli et al., 2017, 2020).
Spatial data on pollination sufficiency scores
Pollination sufficiency scores are calculated based on the extent of (semi-)natural habitat within the foraging distance of cropland areas, following the approach by Chaplin-Kramer et al. (2019). The pollination sufficiency scores are derived from reclassified ESA CCI data (2015) and MAgPIE-SEALS land-use/land-cover projections (2050). Projected land-use patterns from MAgPIE are first downscaled to 10 arcseconds with the SEALS model. To estimate pollination sufficiency scores, cropland pixels are ranked by values between 0 and 1. 1 indicates >30% semi-natural habitat within 2 km around cropland, while values between 0 and 1 indicate a relative proportion from 0 to 30%. This threshold is based on empirical studies that have demonstrated the reliable prediction of pollination supply based on the area of (semi-)natural habitat surrounding cropland. The data is displayed in Fig.6 of the paper.
MAgPIE output
The data includes all modelled outputs (food demand, agricultural production, emissions etc.) from 1995 to 2100 for the BAU, PROTECT, COACTION and MULTI scenarios at the spatial cluster level (fulldata.gdx) and at the regional level (report.mif).The NetCDFs contain the disaggregated land-use projections until 2100, while the fulldata.gdx contains the actual model outputs at MAgPIE's native resolution (accessible via the GAMS software or e.g. via R).
References
von Jeetze, P. J., Weindl, I., Johnson, J. A., Borrelli, P., Panagos, P., Molina Bacca, E. J., Karstens, K., Humpenöder, F., Dietrich, J. P., Minoli, S., Müller, C., Lotze-Campen, H., & Popp, A. (2023). Projected landscape-scale repercussions of global action for climate and biodiversity protection. Nature Communications, 14, Article number: 2515. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38043-1
