The environmental consequences of climate-driven agricultural frontiers

RESEARCH ARTICLE The environmental consequences of climate- driven agricultural frontiers Lee Hannah1, Patrick R. Roehrdanz1, Krishna Bahadur K. C.ID2*, Evan D. G. Fraser3, Camila I. Donatti1, Leonardo Saenz4, Timothy Max Wright4, Robert J. Hijmans5, Mark Mulligan6, Aaron Berg2, Arnout van Soesbergen6,7 1 The Betty and Gordon Moore Center for Science, Conservation International, Arlington, Virginia, United States of America, 2 Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 3 Arrell Food Institute and the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 4 Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan, United States of America, 5 Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California Davis, Davis, California, United States of America, 6 Department of Geography, Kings College London, London, United Kingdom, 7 UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge, United Kingdom * krishnak@uoguelph.ca Abstract Growing conditions for crops such as coffee and wine grapes are shifting to track climate change. Research on these crop responses has focused principally on impacts to food production impacts, but evidence is emerging that they may have serious environmental consequences as well. Recent research has documented potential environmental impacts of shifting cropping patterns, including impacts on water, wildlife, pollinator interaction, carbon storage and nature conservation, on national to global scales. Multiple crops will

be moving in response to shifting climatic suitability, and the cumulative environmental effects of these multi-crop shifts at global scales is not known. Here we model for the first time multiple major global commodity crop suitability changes due to climate change, to estimate the impacts of new crop suitability on water, biodiversity and carbon storage. Areas that become newly suitable for one or more crops are Climate-driven Agricultural Frontiers. These frontiers cover an area equivalent to over 30% of the current agricultural land on the planet and have major potential impacts on biodiversity in tropical mountains, on water resources downstream and on carbon storage in high latitude lands. Frontier soils contain up to 177 Gt of C, which might be subject to release, which is the equivalent of over a century of current United States CO2 emissions. Watersheds serving over 1.8 billion people would be impacted by the cultivation of the climate-driven frontiers. Frontiers intersect 19 global biodiversity hotspots and the habitat of 20% of all global restricted range birds. Sound planning and management of climate-driven agricultural frontiers can therefore help reduce globally significant impacts on people, ecosystems and the climate system. PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228305 February 12, 2020 1 / 19 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Hannah L, Roehrdanz PR, K. C. KB, Fraser EDG, Donatti CI, Saenz L, et al. (2020) The environmental consequences of climate-driven

agricultural frontiers. PLoS ONE 15(2): e0228305. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228305 Editor: Juan A. Añel, Universidade de Vigo, SPAIN Received: January 29, 2019 Accepted: January 13, 2020 Published: February 12, 2020 Copyright: © 2020 Hannah et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Data are available on Figshare (DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.11633352). Funding: The authors would like to thank the Betty and Gordon Moore Center for Science at Conservation International for supporting portions of the research. This paper is also a contribution by the Food from Thought research program of the University of Guelph supported by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund. Competing interests: "The authors have declared that no competing interests exist".