Systematic land use can help build a people- and nature-positive future

Human exploitation of the Earth's natural resources is often underestimated. Yet as The World Counts puts it, "If the Earth's history is compared to a calendar year, modern human life has existed for 37 minutes, and we have used one-third of Earth's natural resources in the last 0.2 seconds."

With only one planet to provide us with everything we need, we need to uproot, rethink, redesign, regenerate and reorganize the way we use its resources, including its surface, reassessing and reallocating land into productive, regulative, supporting and cultural functions to synergize economic, social and environmental goals and to drive a paradigm shift of human society's development trajectory.

Land is the most fundamental and essential bedrock for all our activities. Through agriculture, forestry, mining and other uses, land offers the food, water, materials and energy necessary for human subsistence, alongside a plethora of economic rewards. Together with the planet's oceans, land is the basis for natural capital and ecosystem services.

While land is a bountiful asset, it is also a finite resource. Currently, around 75 percent of the terrestrial environment and 66 percent of the marine environment have been severely altered by humans. But it doesn't end there. Land degradation contributes to increasing net greenhouse gas emissions, loss of natural ecosystems, declining biodiversity and increasing soil contamination as well as the growing vulnerability of marginalized groups. Land degradation is estimated to impact the well-being of at least 3.2 billion people.

Land use choices are inextricably tied to the state of nature and climate. Land can be either a source of greenhouse gases or a sink for them. It can either sustain or deplete biodiversity. Land is at once the problem and solution, depending on how we choose to manage it.

Though land use and cover change often occur at a local level, the aggregated impacts can cascade into critical blows to Earth system processes.

The land use objectives of different sectors and stakeholders are not always compatible, and oftentimes conflicting. Prioritizing a certain geographical region or a certain land function often triggers trade-offs, over space, time and among stakeholders. For example, the rapid expansion of Brazilian soy production has improved the livelihoods of farmers and promoted economic growth and enhanced food security for the country and the world. At the same time, the conversion of forest into cropland has also led to biodiversity loss, increased carbon emissions, and caused damage to the regulating and supporting ecosystem services of forests in general, which will result in negative externalities on local, regional and global levels. The Science Panel for the Amazon warns that 18 percent of the Amazon forests have been cleared, and another 17 percent face degradation risks.

Trade is an important factor in sustainable land management. On the one hand, trade provides an incentive and prompts local stakeholders and large-scale investors to utilize land in accordance with its natural resource endowments and comparative advantages. This specialization linked to trade can magnify ecological disruption through scale effects. On the other hand, land is the basis for many public goods, such as water quality, biodiversity and a stable climate, all of which can be traced back to land use. As such, at a global scale, securing public goods would be the priority, while at a local scale, local stakeholders will seek to increase production and improve their livelihoods — these two objectives might clash. Therefore, land use planning not only has to balance land use functions, but also must consider and mediate the benefits of stakeholders at every scale.

Currently, short-term needs and economic gains are the primary motives behind land use decisions, overlooking the long-term and wide-spreading risks of unsustainable land use change.

To achieve a more harmonious and sustainable development, a systematic land use approach is needed.

For instance, agrivoltaics is an increasingly popular approach that uses the same land area for solar photovoltaic and agriculture, by elevating solar panels and growing crops underneath them. The Aurora Solar Project in Minnesota is an attempt at incorporating pollinator-friendly plantings in agrivoltaic projects. By planting pollinator-friendly vegetation in and around solar panels, they can provide habitats for wild insect pollinators, improve water quality, reduce soil erosion, and increase crop yields thanks to more pollination services. Similarly, solar farms in Qinghai province have also planted grass using the cleaning water that runs off the solar panels. With these pastures for grazing, the Hainan Tibet autonomous prefecture in Qinghai now has more than 22,000 cattle and sheep on solar farms. Owing to agrivoltaic projects, the prefecture has also seen a 50 percent decrease in wind speed, 30 percent decrease in soil moisture loss, and 80 percent increase in vegetation cover.

In collaboration with the China Council for International Cooperation and Development, the Research Institute for Eco-civilization of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology, and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, and the World Economic Forum has initiated a pilot study on Integrated Land Use in China. The study aims to identify critical issues in creating synergy between biodiversity targets, "dual carbon goals", and water and food security through land use optimization.

It is predicted that 90 percent of land could become degraded by 2050, stripping businesses of the very resources they rely on, and backtracking advances in socioeconomic development. Compounded by the effects of land degradation on climate change and biodiversity, sustainable land use is essential for safeguarding and future proofing businesses. According to the World Economic Forum's New Nature Economy Report series, nature-positive transitions in food and land-use related sectors could create $502 billions of annual business value and 29 million jobs by 2030 in China. Moving forward, it is imperative for businesses to reassess the impacts of their operations on land in relation to biodiversity, climate, freshwater and the oceans, and adopt science-based targets for nature.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted last December sets out ambitious and time-bound targets to help turn the corner on land degradation and biodiversity loss. At the heart of the new framework is the pledge to protect 30 percent of all land as well as oceans, and shift toward regenerative land-use in the agricultural and other key sectors. The crucial challenge now is to move toward the implementation of these and other targets, not least through partnerships with the business sector, governments, international agencies and civil society.

Our generation is currently at an inflection point in the evolution of the planet and human life on it. By 2030 we will have largely decided the next 100 years or more — whether it will be a century of snowballing destruction, or whether we stand a chance of stabilizing and restoring the environment. Now, is a perilous moment, but also a promising one for us to decide human's destiny. Here and now, we are staring peril and promise in the eye.

Zhu Chunquan is head of China Nature Initiatives at the World Economic Forum. Scott Vaughan is international chief adviser at the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development. Zhang Huiyong is deputy director of the Secretariat of China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development. The authors contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.