A new study details how, as wealthy countries rewild farmland, they are driving the destruction of forests in poorer countries that are more abundant in wildlife.
When industrialized nations in Europe and North America reclaim farmland, “the resulting shortfalls in food and wood production will have to be made up somewhere,” said Andrew Balmford of the University of Cambridge. Typically, countries in Africa and South America are picking up the slack, at great cost to wildlife.
Balmford is the lead author of a new paper, published in Science, that finds that rewilding cropland in the U.K. may ultimately incur five times more damage to wildlife than it avoids, a phenomenon authors refer to as the “biodiversity leak.”
Conversely, the paper found, rewilding Brazilian soybean farms would push production to Argentina and the U.S., but because Brazil possesses a greater diversity of wildlife, the gains for nature would be five times greater than the harms.
Authors call for confronting “leakage” when setting conservation goals, noting that a U.N. agreement to protect 30 percent of land and sea makes no mention of this issue.
“The first thing we need to do is collectively acknowledge that these leaks exist,” said coauthor Brendan Fisher, of the University of Vermont. “If protesting a logging concession in the U.S.A. increases demand for pulp from the tropics, then we are unlikely to be helping biodiversity.”
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