Nature – Gall et al. (2025): Strategic land reallocation enhances carbon sequestration and biodiversity protection without compromising agricultural productivity in Great Britain
Sarah S. Gall, Tom Harwood, Michael Obersteiner and Jim W. Hall, IN: Communications Earth & Environment, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02728-w
Due to the negative environmental consequences of current land-use, and land’s important role regarding carbon, biodiversity and food security, there is an urgent interest in reforming land-use. Policy objectives for tree planting to sequester carbon and the protection of land to increase biodiversity require land reallocation, which leads to inevitable trade-offs. Here, the authors evaluate the trade-offs between three objectives for rural land: agricultural/forestry production, carbon sequestration and biodiversity, by calculating metrics for these three objectives on a 500 m grid covering Great Britain. They use a multi-objective optimisation that allows them to explore the full option space of possible land conversions and identify the land allocations that entail limited trade-offs.