NEWS
Could Abandoned Agricultural
Lands Help Save the Planet?
Agriculture’s global footprint is decreasing — more land globally is now being abandoned by farming
than converted to it. This, some researchers contend, presents an opportunity for ecological restoration
that could help fight climate change and stem the loss of biodiversity.
Reprinted From: http://bit.ly/2PoWnUW
Richard Conniff
P
eople have lived in Castro Laborei-
ro, where northern Portugal bor-
ders Spain, long enough to have
built megaliths in the mountainous
countryside and a pre-Romanesque
church, from 1,100 years ago, in the vil-
lage itself. But the old rural population
has dwindled away, leaving behind
mostly elders yearning for their vanish-
ing culture.
Roughly half the area once grazed by
sheep, goats, and cattle is now unused
and reverting to nature, meaning that
wolves, bears, wild boars, and other
species have rebounded in their old
habit. Iberian ibex and griffon vultures
thrive where they were extinct, or near-
ly so, as recently as the 1990s. So what
feels like loss to some village residents,
looks to others like a great recovery.
Places like Castro Laboreiro are of
course everywhere. Abandonment of
rural lands has become one of the most
dramatic planet-wide changes of our
time, affecting millions of square miles
of land.
The study, led by researchers from the
University of Minnesota, found that
abandoned lands can take decades or
even centuries to recover their original
biodiversity and productivity.
But it termed land abandonment “an
unprecedented opportunity for eco-
logical restoration efforts to help to
mitigate a sixth mass extinction and its
consequences for human wellbeing.”
Indeed, by some accounts, a more ag-
gressive - and evidence-based - ap-
proach to restoring abandoned lands
could bring about major progress in
both the climate and extinction emer-
gencies.
The biggest caveat
is that current gov-
ernmental initiatives
on degraded lands
lack even rudimen-
tary planning.
A study earlier this year in Science cal-
culated the potential tree cover on “de-
graded” lands worldwide and found,
according to senior author Thomas
Crowther of ETH Zurich, that a massive
program to plant trees and grow them
to maturity “could cut carbon dioxide
Figure 1: The town of Castro Laboreiro, Portugal, where former grazing
lands have reverted to nature. ANTONIO LOMBA/FLICKR
Partly it’s a product of rural flight, and
the economic, social, and educational
appeal of cities. Partly it’s about larger
forces like climate change and globali-
zation of the food supply chain.
But the result, according to a new study
in Nature Ecology and Evolution, is
that the global footprint of agriculture
has “started decreasing in size during
the past two decades, with more land
now being abandoned from agriculture
than converted to it, especially in West-
ern Europe and North America.” (This
change doesn’t appear to have affect-
ed global food supply, at least not yet,
because the land lost was marginal to
start with, and farming elsewhere has
become more productive.)
35
Grassroots
Vol 20
No 1
March 2020