The reimagined world map of agriculture includes large new farming areas for many major crops both around the cornbelt in the mid-western US and below the Sahara desert. Huge areas of farmland in Europe and India would be restored to natural habitat.
The redesign – assuming high-input, mechanised farming – would cut the carbon impact of global croplands by 71 per cent, by allowing land to revert to its natural, forested state. This is the equivalent of capturing 20 years’ worth of our current net CO2 emissions. Trees capture carbon as they grow and also enable more carbon to be captured by the soil than when crops are grown in it.
In this optimised scenario, the impact of crop production on the world’s biodiversity would be reduced by 87 per cent. This would drastically reduce the extinction risk for many species, to whom agriculture is a major threat. The researchers say that croplands would quickly revert back to their natural state, often recovering...