New maps show that the Earth is rapidly running out of fertile land and that food production will soon be unable to keep up with the world's burgeoning population. The maps reveal that more than one- third of the world's land is being used to grow crops or graze cattle.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison combined satellite land cover images with agricultural census data from every country in the world to create detailed maps of global land use. Each grid square was 10km across and showed the most prevalent land use in that square, such as forest, grassland or ice.
"In the act of making these maps we are asking: where is the human footprint on the Earth?" said Amato Evan, a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison research team presenting its results this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
The current map shows a snapshot of global land use for the year 2000, but the scientists also have land use data going back to 1700, showing how things have changed.
"The maps show, very strikingly, that a large part of our planet [roughly 40 percent] is being used for either growing crops or grazing cattle," said Navin Ramankutty, a member of the Wisconsin-Madison team.
By comparison, only 7 percent of the world's land was being used for agriculture in 1700. The Amazon basin has seen some of the greatest changes in recent times, with huge swaths of the rainforest being felled to grow soya beans.
"One of the major changes we see is the fast expansion of soybeans in Brazil and Argentina, grown for export to China and the EU," Ramankutty said.
This agricultural expansion has come at the expense of tropical forests in both countries. Meanwhile, intensive farming practices mean that cropland areas have decreased slightly in the US and Europe and the land is being gobbled up by urbanization. The research indicates that there is now little room for further agricultural expansion.
"Except for Latin America and Africa, all the places in the world where we could grow crops are already being cultivated. The remaining places are either too cold or too dry to grow crops," Ramankutty said.
The scientists hope that by continuing to monitor changes in land use, they will be able to highlight problems and help find solutions.
"The real question is, how can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?" Ramankutty said.
In other environmental news, scientists now now believe the role of snow in maintaining the Earth's climate is far more important than previously thought. According to a new climate model in which researchers imagined a world without snow, not only would global temperatures rise but, bizarrely, the amount of permanently frozen land in the world would also go up.
Losing every last snowflake in the world is an unlikely scenario. But global warming is expected to melt around 10 to 20 percent of the world's snow in the future and, by modeling the no-snow climate, Stephen Vavrus from the University of Wisconsin-Madison was able to work out how the predicted melting would affect the planet. Snow tends to cool the air above it and stops the Earth from overheating. Vavrus found that, in a world without snow, the temperatures in the northern hemisphere rocketed.
"Without snow we see a large atmospheric warming of up to 5?C over northern Eurasia and North America annually [8-9?C in winter], and a globally averaged warming of 0.8?C," he said.
Snow provides a warm insulating blanket and without it vast areas of land would become permanently frozen.
"Soils in presently snow-covered areas, such as Siberia, would cool considerably, by up to 20?C during winter. As a result, the permafrost would expand equatorwards by 500 to 1,000km, even though the overlying air warms by several degrees," said Vavrus, who will present his findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of