Coupled social and land use dynamics affect dietary choice and agricultural land-use extent

Dietary patterns have long been a driver of global land use. Increasingly, they also respond to it, in part because of social processes that support adoption of eco-conscious diets. Here we develop a coupled social-and-land use mathematical model parameterised for 153 countries. We project global land use for future population, income, and agricultural yield using our coupled dynamical model. We find that coupled social-and-land feedbacks can alter the peak global land use for agriculture by up to 2 billion hectares, depending on the parameter regime. Across all yield scenarios, the model projects that social dynamics will cause an increase in eco-conscious dietary behaviour until the middle of the 21st century, after which it will decline in response to declining land use caused by a shrinking global population. The model also exhibits a regime of synergistic effects whereby simultaneous changes to multiple socio-economic parameters are required to change land use projections. This research demonstrates the value of including coupled social-and-land feedbacks in land use projections.

Saptarshi Pal, Chris T. Bauch, Madhur Anand