The authors of this paper have tried to develop a framework to apply the concept of planetary boundaries to national level decision making and to discuss what a country’s ‘fair share’ of Earth’s safe operating space could be.

Future demand for food and for land is set to grow. A key question is therefore: how can we most productively use land for food, in order balance the multiple competing demands for the ecosystem services it provides? One way this has been investigated previously is by looking at crop yields and how to increase them. Another way, focussing instead on the consumption side, has looked at the metric of dietary land footprint.

Entering into the sustainable intensification debate, Johan Rockström from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and colleagues propose that a paradigm for sustainable intensification can be defined and translated into an quantitative, operational framework for agricultural development.

This EU brief looks at a recent study assessing the social environmental impacts of agricultural imports to EU from other, often less developed countries. The EU has thus picked up on an important study assessing Europen diets' contribution to excessive land-use in countries outside of the European Union. FCRN has previously highlighted this study (Balancing virtual land imports by a shift in the diet. Using a land balance approach to assess the sustainability of food consumption).

A new study from International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis IIAS considers whether it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture by producing more food on less land. It specifically focuses on the effects of crop yield and livestock feed efficiency scenarios on GHG emissions from agriculture and land use change in developing countries.

Details as follows: According to many authorities the impact of humanity on the earth is already overshooting the earth’s capacity to supply humanity’s needs. This is an unsustainable position. This book does not focus on the problem but on the solution, by showing what it is like to live within a fair earth share ecological footprint.

This report says that Europe’s high consumption levels of products such as meat, dairy and textiles that require large areas of land, mean that Europe’s 'land footprint' remains one of the largest in the world. The report finds that the EU is importing the equivalent of 1,212,050 square kilometres to meet its demand for food.

Europe’s land footprint is 640 million hectares a year – an area equivalent to 1.5 times the size of Europe itself. This is the land required to make everything that we consume, from food to material products to fuel.

The Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University has released a report suggesting that farmland useage might have peaked and the land required for agriculture will start to shrink. The authors predict that in the next half-century, a geographical area more than twice the size of France will return to its natural state from farmland. The Rockefeller researchers say factors such as slower population growth, declines in deforestation, and improved agricultural yields have spared the “unimaginable destruction of nature.”