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Reconciling regional nitrogen boundaries with global food security

Nature Food volume 2, pages 700–711 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

While nitrogen inputs are crucial to agricultural production, excess nitrogen contributes to serious ecosystem damage and water pollution. Here, we investigate this trade-off using an integrated modelling framework. We quantify how different nitrogen mitigation options contribute to reconciling food security and compliance with regional nitrogen surplus boundaries. We find that even when respecting regional nitrogen surplus boundaries, hunger could be substantially alleviated with 590 million fewer people at risk of hunger from 2010 to 2050, if all nitrogen mitigation options were mobilized simultaneously. Our scenario experiments indicate that when introducing regional N targets, supply-side measures such as the nitrogen use efficiency improvement are more important than demand-side efforts for food security. International trade plays a key role in sustaining global food security under nitrogen boundary constraints if only a limited set of mitigation options is deployed. Policies that respect regional nitrogen surplus boundaries would yield a substantial reduction in non-CO2 GHG emissions of 2.3 GtCO2e yr−1 in 2050, which indicates a necessity for policy coordination.

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Fig. 1: Illustration of modelled N flows and their magnitudes in 2010.
Fig. 2: Spatial variation in a regional N risk indicator for the year 2010.
Fig. 3: Projections of relative changes in global agricultural production and international trade for crop (in dry matter) and animal products (in protein).
Fig. 4: Projections of indicators related to food security and associated N cycles and non-CO2 GHG emissions.
Fig. 5: Population at risk of hunger by 2050 in selected world regions under different N management and climate scenarios.

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Data availability

The main data that support the findings of this study are available at the public Data Repository of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (https://dare.iiasa.ac.at/125/ and https://doi.org/10.22022/IBF/07-2021.125). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code used for the statistical analysis of the scenario data is available from the corresponding author on request.

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Acknowledgements

J.C. and M.O. were supported by European Research Council Synergy grant no. ERC-2013-SynG-610028 Imbalance-P. Support from the Global Environment Facility of the United Nations Environment Programme through the project ‘Towards an International Nitrogen Management System’ for the organization of workshops proved essential to the success of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Jinfeng Chang

  2. Ecosystems Services and Management Program (ESM), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

    Jinfeng Chang, Petr Havlík, David Leclère, Hugo Valin, Andre Deppermann & Michael Obersteiner

  3. Environmental Systems Analysis Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands

    Wim de Vries

  4. College of Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, Japan

    Tomoko Hasegawa

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Contributions

J.C. and P.H. designed the study. J.C. carried out the GLOBIOM modelling with help from P.H., D.L., H.V. and A.D. W.d.V. provided the methodology for estimating regional N surplus boundaries. J.C. performed the analysis and wrote an initial draft. All authors contributed substantially to the interpretation of the results and to the text.

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Correspondence to Jinfeng Chang.

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Peer review information Nature Food thanks Thomas Nesme, Aimable Uwizeye and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Chang, J., Havlík, P., Leclère, D. et al. Reconciling regional nitrogen boundaries with global food security. Nat Food 2, 700–711 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00366-x

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