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Purdue Press Release: Data analysis spans 1960s Green Revolution to 2015
New, groundbreaking research shows how, at a local scale, agricultural research and development led to improved crop varieties that resulted in global benefits to the environment and food system sustainability. The Purdue University study appears in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“At the global level, we see a reduction in cropland use from these technology improvements leading to gains in terrestrial carbon stock and avoided loss of threatened plant and animal species,” reported the team led by Purdue’s Uris Baldos, research associate professor of agricultural economics.
The study is the first to undertake a fine-scale analysis back to the early 1960s. The analysis incorporated global data from approximately 100,000 grid cells. Each cell covers an area measuring 27.2 square kilometers (10.5 square miles) at the equator. Grid cells farther north and south of the equator become smaller because of the Earth’s curvature.
New PNAS publication from Uris Baldos, Alfredo Cisneros-Pineda, Keith Fuglie, and Tom Hertel focuses on adoption of improved crop varieties limited biodiversity losses, terrestrial carbon emissions, and cropland expansion in the tropics.
Agriculture is one of the main drivers of global land use change (LUC) as well as terrestrial carbon and biodiversity losses. While the environmental footprint from agricultural production could be reduced by sustained productivity growth, past studies have ignored local heterogeneity of agricultural production and its impact on biodiversity and terrestrial carbon stocks. Using the latest estimates of productivity impacts from the adoption of improved crop varieties in the developing world and a spatially explicit equilibrium model of global agriculture, our findings show that, at the global level, historical crop improvements over the period 1961–2015 resulted in less cropland expansion, lower LUC greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and potentially saved thousands of threatened plant and animal species from extinction.
