Revealing the interactions between global biodiversity change and human food security

旨在确保人类福祉，同时为子孙后代保护地球自然环境的可持续发展，是21世纪最大的挑战之一。联合国最近商定了一系列可持续发展目标（sdg），其中包括环境和社会目标，包括制止世界各地的生物多样性丧失和消除饥饿。重要的是，这些目标涉及高度相互关联的部门：生物多样性和农业（主要用于粮食生产）在生态系统内相互作用，粮食消费区域与全球粮食系统内的粮食生产区域相互作用。在这个项目中，我们将侧重于评估和解释粮食生产与生物多样性之间的相互作用，我们还将量化贸易联系在形成粮食生产对全球生物多样性影响方面的作用。为了有效推进可持续发展目标，有必要了解生物多样性变化与人类粮食安全之间的相互作用。这些相互作用可以采取多种形式，最明显的是用于粮食生产的农业用地是对生物多样性的最大压力之一。然而，生物多样性的变化也可能影响粮食生产。事实上，某些物种群体为农业提供了重要的服务，如授粉、养分循环和控制害虫。这些类群中物种多样性较高的生态系统已被证明具有更高水平的某些生态系统服务，如授粉，并且随着时间的推移具有更稳定的农业生产。在我们之前的研究中，我们使用生物多样性模型来了解人类对农业用地的利用如何影响世界各地的生物多样性。我们还使用这些模型来预测在人类如何利用土地的不同情况下，未来生物多样性可能会发生怎样的变化。然而，到目前为止，这些模型相对粗糙，这阻碍了对生物多样性和粮食安全之间相互作用的理解。在本项目中，我们将以三种重要的方式推进生物多样性模型，以解释生物多样性变化与粮食生产之间的相互作用。首先，我们会问农业对生物多样性的影响在不同的环境中是如何变化的（例如，不同的气候或周围的自然栖息地）。这将帮助我们确定农业对生物多样性影响较小的环境。其次，我们将评估农业系统的特征，如生产力、肥料和农药的使用如何对生物多样性产生不同的影响。这将使我们能够确定对生物多样性影响较小的农业实践。第三，我们将探讨不同的物种群体如何受到农业的影响。这将使我们能够确定生物多样性变化对粮食安全产生反馈的情况，例如，传粉媒介等关键物种群体的损失是否超过其他物种。通过我们改进的模型，我们将确定世界各地粮食生产和生物多样性变化相互作用最强烈的地方。我们还将调查全球农产品贸易如何与生物多样性变化联系起来，以确定粮食消费对生物多样性产生特别强烈影响的地方，可能是世界偏远地区。最后，我们将做出未来的预测，以确定人类社会的发展途径，这些途径可能导致与生物多样性的更小或更大的相互作用。总之，模型的改进和应用将使我们更好地了解全球范围内生物多样性变化与粮食安全之间的相互作用，这将是指导旨在实现联合国可持续发展目标的环境、保护和农业政策的关键。

Sustainable development, aimed at ensuring human well-being while protecting the Earth's natural environment for future generations, is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. The United Nations recently agreed on a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which encompass both environmental and social targets, including halting biodiversity loss and ending hunger across the world. Importantly, these goals concern highly interlinked sectors: biodiversity and agriculture (largely for food production) interact within ecosystems, and regions of food consumption interact with areas of food production within the global food system. In this project, we will focus on evaluating and explaining the interactions between food production and biodiversity, and we will also quantify the role of trade linkages in shaping the impacts of food production on biodiversity globally.In order to effectively progress towards the SDGs, it is necessary to understand the interactions between biodiversity changes and human food security. These interactions can take a number of forms, most obviously that agricultural land use for food production is one of the greatest pressures on biodiversity. However, biodiversity changes may also impact food production. Indeed, certain groups of species provide important services that support agriculture, such as pollination, nutrient cycling, and control of insect pests. Ecosystems with a higher diversity of species within these groups have been shown to have higher levels of certain ecosystem services, such as pollination, and to have more stable agricultural production through time. In our previous research, we have used models of biodiversity to understand how human use of the land for agriculture impacts biodiversity across the world. We have also used these models to make predictions of how biodiversity might change in the future under different scenarios of how humans will use the land. However, these models have so far been relatively crude, which has prevented an understanding of the interactions between biodiversity and food security. In this project, we will advance biodiversity models in three important ways to explain the interactions between biodiversity change and food production. First, we will ask how the effects of agriculture on biodiversity vary in different environments (e.g. differing in climate or in the surrounding natural habitat). This will help us identify those environments where agriculture has a smaller impact on biodiversity. Second, we will assess how the characteristics of agricultural systems, such as productivity, fertilizer and pesticide use cause different impacts on biodiversity. This will allow us to identify agricultural practices with smaller effects on biodiversity. Third, we will explore how different groups of species are impacted by agriculture. This will allow us to identify instances where there is feedback from biodiversity change to food security, for example if key groups of species such as pollinators are lost more than other species. With our improved models, we will identify where around the world food production and biodiversity change are most strongly interacting. We will also investigate how global trade in agricultural products is linked to biodiversity change, to identify where food consumption has particularly strong biodiversity impacts, potentially in remote regions of the world. Finally, we will make future predictions to identify the pathways of development in human societies that are likely to lead to smaller or larger interactions with biodiversity. Together, the model improvements and applications will provide a much better understanding of the interactions between biodiversity change and food security at the global scale, which will be key to guide environmental, conservation and agricultural policies aimed at achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.