Prof. Peter H. Verburg

European agriculture must transform to confront the many challenges it faces, yet there are different sets of values that may underpin future agricultural change. However, we currently lack thorough understanding of the implications of operationalising these plural values for European land systems. In this article, we apply the IPBES Nature Futures Framework to develop a set of three land-change scenario narratives—the Agricultural Futures Framework (AFF)—representing the diverse ways that humans value agricultural land systems: Land for Food and Land for Nature, Land as Culture, and Land for Society. We operationalise the AFF scenarios in the CLUMondo land-change model and simulate how these alternative value perspectives could reshape land systems in Europe by 2050, accounting for future demands for food production, carbon sequestration, nature restoration, and nitrogen emission reduction. We find that significant land-system reconfiguration would be needed to fulfil these multiple demands under all three scenarios, ranging from 18.8% to 37.1% of all European land, with multiple scenarios showing multifunctional pathways in Eastern Romania and Bulgaria, productivist pathways in Poland and Slovakia, and marginalisation/rewilding pathways in Central France and Northern Spain. However, the magnitude and spatial locations of change differ substantially across the prioritised value perspectives, suggesting that these may have large implications for future agricultural development. The AFF framework and our findings are useful for identifying opportunities to reconcile the divisions in values perspectives, and to prioritise interventions for agri-food transformations.

In the context of rapidly growing African cities, a thorough understanding of the complexities of urban food systems is essential for addressing the challenges of food insecurity and undernourishment for city dwellers. Particularly in South Africa, where pre-existing inequalities drive disparities in food access and diet-related health outcomes, a comprehensive perspective including the spatial distribution of malnutrition in urban environments is required to develop effective interventions. The present study examines the essential elements of an urban food system by employing a Bayesian network as a causal framework. By integrating survey data from households and food outlets with spatial information, a food systems model was created to test policy interventions. The study demonstrates the challenges of intervening in complex urban food systems, where dietary choices are shaped by various factors, often in a spatially heterogeneous manner. Interventions do not always benefit the targeted groups and are sometimes ineffective as result of system interactions. Our study shows that Bayesian network models provide a powerful tool to effectively analyse the complex interactions within such systems, thereby enabling the identification of optimal combinations of multifactor interventions. In our case study for Worcester, South Africa, the results reveal that the largest potential for improvement of food and nutrition security lies in the informal food sector, and support for affordable and local fresh produce is a viable measure for enhancing local nutrition, though the extent of impact varies across the city.

Agrarian transition is often seen as a pathway towards sustainable development and increasing well-being for rural households. However, empirical evidence on trade-offs and synergies between different dimensions of well-being as a result of agrarian transitions is lacking. We conducted a cross-sectional survey of 360 households across 12 villages in Savannakhet province, Lao PDR. We find evidence of synergies across different farmer types and between all included well-being dimensions; economic, food security, health, and gender equality. However, for intensive paddy rice farmers, synergies are predominantly positive, while for non-intensive cash crop farmers synergies are mostly negative. These findings indicate that development in one well-being dimension may provide improvements in other dimensions, but that benefits can be difficult to achieve for some types of farmers. Our results further suggest that rural development policies focussing on a single well-being aspect, for example supporting non-farm incomes, may have co-benefits beyond the immediate development targets.

Land use intensification favours particular trophic groups which can induce architectural changes in food webs. These changes can impact ecosystem functions, services, stability and resilience. However, the imprint of land management intensity on food-web architecture has rarely been characterized across large spatial extent and various land uses. We investigated the influence of land management intensity on six facets of food-web architecture, namely apex and basal species proportions, connectance, omnivory, trophic chain lengths and compartmentalization, for 67,051 European terrestrial vertebrate communities. We also assessed the dependency of this influence of intensification on land use and climate. In addition to more commonly considered climatic factors, the architecture of food webs was notably influenced by land use and management intensity. Intensification tended to strongly lower the proportion of apex predators consistently across contexts. In general, intensification also tended to lower proportions of basal species, favoured mesopredators, decreased food webs compartmentalization whereas it increased their connectance. However, the response of food webs to intensification was different for some contexts. Intensification sharply decreased connectance in Mediterranean and Alpine settlements, and it increased basal tetrapod proportions and compartmentalization in Mediterranean forest and Atlantic croplands. Besides, intensive urbanization especially favoured longer trophic chains and lower omnivory. By favouring mesopredators in most contexts, intensification could undermine basal tetrapods, the cascading effects of which need to be assessed. Our results support the importance of protecting top predators where possible and raise questions about the long-term stability of food webs in the face of human-induced pressures.

To meet the COP15 biodiversity framework in the European Union (EU), one target is to protect 30% of its land by 2030 through a resilient transnational conservation network. The European Alps are a key hub of this network hosting some of the most extensive natural areas and biodiversity hotspots in Europe. Here we assess the robustness of the current European reserve network to safeguard the European Alps’ flora by 2080 using semi-mechanistic simulations. We first highlight that the current network needs strong readjustments as it does not capture biodiversity patterns as well as our conservation simulations. Overall, we predict a strong shift in conservation need through time along latitudes, and from lower to higher elevations as plants migrate upslope and shrink their distribution. While increasing species, trait and evolutionary diversity, migration could also threaten 70% of the resident flora. In the face of global changes, the future European reserve network will need to ensure strong elevation and latitudinal connections to complementarily protect multifaceted biodiversity beyond national borders.

The health of the planet and its people are at risk. The deterioration of the global commons—ie, the natural systems that support life on Earth—is exacerbating energy, food, and water insecurity, and increasing the risk of disease, disaster, displacement, and conflict. In this Commission, we quantify safe and just Earth-system boundaries (ESBs) and assess minimum access to natural resources required for human dignity and to enable escape from poverty. Collectively, these describe a safe and just corridor that is essential to ensuring sustainable and resilient human and planetary health and thriving in the Anthropocene. We then discuss the need for translation of ESBs across scales to inform science-based targets for action by key actors (and the challenges in doing so), and conclude by identifying the system transformations necessary to bring about a safe and just future.

Our concept of the safe and just corridor advances research on planetary boundaries and the justice and Earth-system aspects of the Sustainable Development Goals. We define safe as ensuring the biophysical stability of the Earth system, and our justice principles include minimising harm, meeting minimum access needs, and redistributing resources and responsibilities to enhance human health and wellbeing. The ceiling of the safe and just corridor is defined by the more stringent of the safe and just ESBs to minimise significant harm and ensure Earth-system stability. The base of the corridor is defined by the impacts of minimum global access to food, water, energy, and infrastructure for the global population, in the domains of the variables for which we defined the ESBs. Living within the corridor is necessary, because exceeding the ESBs and not meeting basic needs threatens human health and life on Earth. However, simply staying within the corridor does not guarantee justice because within the corridor resources can also be inequitably distributed, aggravating human health and causing environmental damage. Procedural and substantive justice are necessary to ensure that the space within the corridor is justly shared. [...]

Current agricultural practices in Europe are increasingly aggravating societal and environmental safety concerns. This creates social and regulatory pressures on farmers, which can lead to declining material and social status of farmers, farmer discontent, and anti-regulation protests. These tensions are rooted in conflicting value systems for agricultural development, which can range from productivist pathways (i.e. valuing production above all else) to increasing multifunctionality pathways (i.e. valuing agriculture for its contribution to multiple economic, environmental and societal needs). It is largely unknown to what degree individual farms and agricultural landscapes are transitioning towards increasing productivism or multifunctionality in practice. Here, we mapped landscape changes and interviewed farmers (n = 274) to examine the diversity of agricultural development pathways in 17 study sites across Europe over the last 20 years (2000–2020). We also assessed the associations between the development pathways and farmers’ perceptions of socio-economic outcomes, namely job satisfaction, societal valuation, and economic performance. Farm-level development was largely aligned with productivist pathways, while landscape-level changes aligned more closely with an increasing multifunctionality pathway. Farmers on pathways of increasing multifunctionality did not perceive improved outcomes on livelihood indicators as compared to productivist farmers. Furthermore, farms on increasing multifunctionality pathways were concentrated in sites with very high management intensities that face strong pressure from environmental regulations, as well as low-intensity, mountainous sites, where opportunities for intensification are limited. These results suggest that current pathways that increase multifunctionality arise mostly by necessity. Successful agricultural transformation will therefore require policy to create enabling environments that provide socioeconomic benefits for farmers to increase multifunctionality, and a civil society and market conditions that value sustainable agriculture.

Expanding and managing current habitat and species protection measures is at the heart of the European biodiversity strategy. A structured approach is needed to gain insights into such issues is systematic conservation planning, which uses techniques from decision theory to identify places and actions that contribute most effectively to policy objectives given a set of constraints. Yet culturally and historically determined European landscapes make the implementation of any conservation plans challenging, requiring an analysis of synergies and trade-offs before implementation. In this work, we review the scientific literature for evidence of previous conservation planning approaches, highlighting recent advances and success stories. We find that the conceptual characteristics of European conservation planning studies likely reduced their potential in contributing to better-informed decisions. We outline pathways towards improving the uptake of decision theory and multi-criteria conservation planning at various scales, particularly highlighting the need for (a) open data and intuitive tools, (b) the integration of biodiversity-focused conservation planning with multiple objectives, (c) accounting of dynamic ecological processes and functions, and (d) better facilitation of entry-points and co-design practices of conservation planning scenarios with stakeholders. By adopting and improving these practices, European conservation planning might become more actionable and adaptable towards implementable policy outcomes.
This article is part of the theme issue 'Ecological novelty and planetary stewardship: biodiversity dynamics in a transforming biosphere'.

Context: Livestock grazing throughout Europe has resulted in high diversity of semi-natural areas in past centuries. Currently, most low intensity grazing relying on semi-natural vegetation is found primarily in marginal lands. These areas still host a high-level of biodiversity but are subject to abandonment and agricultural intensification.
Objectives: Spatial information on areas where semi-natural vegetation is still grazed, and how contextual geographic conditions encourage or limit grazing is missing, hindering their protection. We present an interdisciplinary approach to map the spatial distribution of grazing in semi-natural areas of the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK).
Methods: We first interviewed grazing experts from European countries, who provided us with estimates on grazing across selected land cover classes per environmental zone and Member State. Subsequently, we analysed the spatial distribution of grazing through maximum entropy modeling using pan-European in-situ data on grazing observations (using LUCAS, an EU wide land use survey) and a set of geographic characteristics representing the local socio-economic, terrain, soil and climatic context.
Results: The expert-derived estimates on grazing suggest that 20.6% (or 134 thousand km²) of semi-natural areas in the EU + UK are grazed, although with low livestock densities. In addition, we find that there is great variety across the region in the factors that explain the occurrence of grazing: while in some regions, farmers’ age and distance to markets are most important, in others terrain or climate are influencing the location of grazing. Finally, we were able to map both the grazing probability as well as actual spatial distribution of grazing on semi-natural areas for the whole of EU and UK.
Conclusions: These data can assist in prioritizing future conservation efforts in these unique land systems.

The cascading effects of biodiversity decline on human well-being present a pressing challenge for sustainable development. Conservation efforts often prioritize safeguarding specific species, habitats, or intact ecosystems but overlook biodiversity's fundamental role in providing Nature's Contributions to People (NCP) in human-modified landscapes. Here, we systematically review 154 peer-reviewed studies to estimate the minimum levels of (semi-)natural habitat quantity, quality, and spatial configuration needed in human-modified landscapes to secure functional integrity essential for sustaining NCP provision. We find that the provision of multiple NCP is threatened when (semi-)natural habitat in the landscape falls below an area of 20%–25% for each km². Five NCP almost completely disappear below a level of 10% habitat. The exact quantity, quality, and spatial configuration of habitat required depends on local context and specific NCP. Today, about two-thirds of human-modified lands have insufficient (semi-)natural habitat, requiring action for NCP regeneration. Our findings serve as a generic guideline to target conservation actions outside natural areas.

Motivation: Accurate estimates of species distributions are crucial for biogeography, spatial conservation, and for assessing the impacts of human activities on species. However, existing approaches to estimate species distributions have typically neglected the influence of land use intensity, potentially overlooking the negative impacts of high-intensity land uses on biodiversity. Here, we build a dataset documenting the habitat suitability of European land systems for terrestrial vertebrate species, based on a novel land system map of Europe that factors in land use intensity. Our database offers refined and up-to-date information on terrestrial vertebrate distributions in Europe by explicitly considering land use intensity.
Main Types of Variables Contained: We created a table defining the suitability of land use classes as habitats for each species. We then built Area of Habitat (AOH) maps for each species by filtering out unsuitable habitat from the latest available estimates of species ranges. AOH maps were then compared with occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Processed datasets and R scripts are publicly available online, facilitating the use of our approach to refine expert-based distributions for other taxa, land system classifications and regions worldwide.
Spatial Location and Grain: The AOH maps cover the spatial extent of the European Union (EU) with the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, and the Western Balkans. The AOH maps are at a 1 km² resolution. Time Period and Grain: The dataset uses information published during the last 10 years.
Major Taxa and Level of Measurement: Habitat suitability was documented for 1155 terrestrial vertebrate species known to occur in Europe: 279 mammals, 520 birds, 251 reptiles and 104 amphibians.
Software Format: We provide the habitat suitability table in a comma-separated values (csv) format. The AOH maps are available as raster files. R scripts are publicly accessible on GitHub.

In this study, we produced a spatially explicit diagnosis of the deforestation hotspots and future climate risk (2050) of cocoa producing areas, zooming into the top 8 cocoa exporting countries and the main global cocoa traders. Cocoa-driven deforestation often co-occurs with deforestation driven by other agri-commodities, and thus needs to be tackled jointly. Climate risk will be substantially increased in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, the two most important suppliers of cocoa, which may lead to supply failures and severe socio-economic impacts if left unaddressed. Climate risk and deforestation have a high spatial variability between and within countries, calling for geographically differentiated approaches to mitigation and adaptation. Large transnational traders depending heavily on West African supplies, as well as the regionally based exporting farmer cooperatives and domestic firms, will be affected by the increased climate risk in that region. Traders operating in Latin America and Southeast Asia might only face a modest increase in climate risk, with subregional exceptions. These results raise concerns about the validity of sustainability commitments made by companies and other sector initiatives, which focus on single commodities and fail to consider the diversity of actors adding pressure on landscapes. Tackling these issues requires a collaborative effort from various sectors and stakeholders involved in land use decisions to prevent the geographical displacement of negative impacts, prioritize urgent action, and implement these changes efficiently and in a coordinated manner. Further, sustainability commitments often neglect climate change adaptation, with agroforestry and climate smart agriculture initiatives primarily focusing on carbon reductions and increased farmer income, paying less attention to farm practices that reduce cocoa vulnerability.

To confront current sustainability challenges, the European Commission aims to transition towards plant-based diets as well as shorter, regionalized value chains. Legume-based meat and dairy alternatives (LBAs) are seen as an important tool in the food system transition, replacing protein from animals with high-protein plant-based sources. However, regionalized LBA value chains require the co-occurrence of legume producers, LBA manufacturers, and consumers, and we lack understanding of the current status and future potential for such value chains in Europe. In this article, we integrate publicly-available datasets with a web-derived inventory of LBA manufacturer locations to map the regional strength of LBA value chains across Europe. Using manufacturers’ visions and employee interviews, we complement the spatial analysis with an exploratory assessment of how actors perceive their role in a plant-based food system transition. Regions in north-western Europe demonstrate (moderately) strong value chains for regionalized LBAs, yet few regions contain all three value chain nodes. The absence of LBA manufacturers is the most widespread barrier for more regional value chains (particularly in Eastern Europe), suggesting a need for infrastructure and policies that incentivize innovation in the value chain and new connections between legume producers, processors, LBA manufacturers, and consumers. LBA manufacturers in our sample express diverse values and therefore could play complementary roles in sustainability transitions. However, global manufacturers are markedly less likely to have visions related to systemic change. Together, our results showcase the potential to expand regionalized LBA value chains to improve sustainability throughout the EU, but regionalisation may not be possible everywhere, highlighting the need for a cross-scale and context-specific approach to plant-based protein transitions.

Land use change is a major driver of environmental degradation, necessitating appropriate planning to navigate trade-offs between societal objectives and ecological impacts. Sound planning is limited in some regions by data scarcity and incomplete scientific knowledge on local dynamics shaping development of land. In this paper, we present a novel expert-based participatory approach that uses Bayesian networks to determine land use suitability and potential conflicts for emerging land uses. This method encompasses a workshop phase for building suitability models for different sectors, data assembly and preparation, spatialization of networks, and iterative validation with experts. Mapped suitabilities for all land uses were used to assess potential competition for land across sectors and to quantify alignment of the expert-modeled outcomes with established land use policy. Applied to Curaçao, a data-poor environment in the Caribbean facing high land use competition, the method enabled the construction and parameterization of 5 Bayesian networks driven by 35 spatial input datasets generated through various methods from participatory mapping to social media analysis. Overlap in suitable locations for conservation and tourism development along segments of the coastline and roadsides of the western island highlight potential conflict stemming from coincidence of desirable natural amenities and ecologically sensitive areas. Results yield key insights that can drive discussion and inform policymakers and spatial planners as they navigate tradeoffs and seek optimal use of limited land resources. Process-based suitability predictions and knowledge of underlying drivers can also enable exploratory analysis into possible future scenarios of change.

Safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for surface water and groundwater (blue water) have been defined for sustainable water management in the Anthropocene. Here we assessed whether minimum human needs could be met with surface water from within individual river basins alone and, where this is not possible, quantified how much groundwater would be required. Approximately 2.6 billion people live in river basins where groundwater is needed because they are already outside the surface water ESB or have insufficient surface water to meet human needs and the ESB. Approximately 1.4 billion people live in river basins where demand-side transformations would be required as they either exceed the surface water ESB or face a decline in groundwater recharge and cannot meet minimum needs within the ESB. A further 1.5 billion people live in river basins outside the ESB, with insufficient surface water to meet minimum needs, requiring both supply- and demand-side transformations. These results highlight the challenges and opportunities of meeting even basic human access needs to water and protecting aquatic ecosystems.

Protecting biodiversity while meeting food demands is a critical challenge due to rising competition over land. The predominant focus on spatial efficiency in land-use modeling frameworks can dichotomize these objectives and ignore local realities by disregarding biodiversity outside priority areas and the land-use needs of communities who depend on local land systems for their nutrition. We develop a spatially explicit exploratory scenario for 2050 that promotes whole-region biodiversity intactness using a land-system-specific intactness index and incorporates differentiated food futures by protecting important land systems for land-dependent communities from conversion for larger-scale objectives. These are pursued alongside SSP2 "business-as-usual" agricultural demands, uncovering potential tradeoffs. Our results highlight the importance of forest mosaics in agricultural landscapes alongside targeted intensification for meeting food and biodiversity goals and that protecting land-dependent communities does not compromise larger-scale objectives. This demonstrates that land-use models can integrate diverse values, including certain conceptualizations of justice, into sustainability scenarios.

Context: Agroecological practices are known to reduce environmental pressure of farming systems and increase food system resilience in tropical regions. In contrast, in the temperate climate and industrialized agricultural context of the Netherlands, agroecology use remains limited and its impacts are unknown. As agroecological systems can form a sustainable alternative to conventional farming, it is relevant to study to what extent farmers use agroecological practices in the Netherlands, potentially serving as a model for transition.
Objective: This study assesses spatial patterns of uptake of agroecological practices and their relationship with income resilience.
Methods: Using data from 735 Dutch farms, we created a composite Agroecology Index to quantify the extent of use of agroecological practices. The FAO's 10 Elements of Agroecology framework was used to select indicators for the index, by selecting the six of the Elements in this framework for which our dataset contained suitable data. Linear regressions explored underlying factors, such as farm size and farm type. Using an outlier analysis, bright and dark spot farms, exceeding or lagging the Dutch average, were mapped. We evaluated the effects of agroecological practices on income resilience over a 10-year period.
Results and conclusions: On a 0–100 scale, agroecology scores ranged from 16.5% to 61.1% (36.6 ± 7.0), with stark contrasts between different Elements of agroecology. Arable farms excelled in Diversity, while livestock farms performed better in Efficiency. Spatial variation was substantial, with both bright and dark spots dispersed across the country. We found highest average scores and the strongest prevalence of bright spots in the province of Flevoland, an area with an exceptional number of organic farmers. Higher agroecology scores were linked to increased income stability, independent of farm size or type.
Significance: The methods developed in this study provide an approach to address the growing demand for evidence of the upscaling of agroecology in practice. Also, the relationships between agroecology and social and environmental outcomes from farm to regional scales can be addressed, which can guide developments towards sustainable agriculture.

European agri-food systems must overcome structural lock-ins to achieve more sustainable modes of production and consumption. Yet European regions are highly diverse, and we lack understanding of how different regional characteristics may enable or inhibit sustainability transitions. This hinders the development of context-tailored governance strategies. In this paper, we identify and apply sets of spatial indicators to map the regional potentials for agri-food transitions. We first analyse the strength of lock-in to the incumbent agro-industrial paradigm. We then map the enabling environments for two alternative agri-food networks—multifunctional value chains and civic food networks—that each embed distinct social–ecological qualities of agriculture and food. Results demonstrate a large spatial diversity in transition potential, with stronger lock-ins throughout North and Western Europe and stronger enabling environments for agri-food transitions in Italy, France, Switzerland, and Southwest Germany. We find that lock-ins are strongest in livestock-dominated regions and are associated with higher GHG emissions and excess nitrogen levels. Our study demonstrates the need for coordinated public policies that (1) leverage region-specific transition potentials and (2) enable complementary innovations in market-based and community-led networks.

Knowing the structural role of species within communities is important for their conservation and management in the context of recent/ongoing biodiversity loss. In a community, dominant species can influence the distribution and composition of subordinate species. Despite existing research, an approach is lacking to help understand the important role of dominant species in the community, without requiring more detailed data. In this study, we describe an approach to rank the relative importance of plant species within a community based on their abundance and co-occurrence patterns. The Co-occurrence Community Importance Index (CoCII) - a newly proposed index translating the degree of influence that each dominant species has on all its co-occurring subordinate species - was calculated and analysed. We used both abiotic and biotic variables within a species distribution models framework, with data collected in the Vez watershed in the North of Portugal. Our analysis included 114 plants - 26 dominant and 88 subordinate species. Spearman correlations were used to analyse potential interspecific relationships between co-occurring dominant and subordinate species. Using the CoCII, we ranked the relative importance of each dominant species within the plant community. Our results support the role of plant-plant interaction patterns regarding our study area's most highly inter-correlated species. Our approach to ranking species' importance can be directly translated into conservation schemes for managing and maintaining the structure of plant communities. Moreover, it can provide insights into the relative importance of dominant species in a plant community from commonly available datasets including presence-absence, presence-only, or percentage cover data, which allows for the relatively cost-efficient in-field collection and monitoring infield. Furthermore, this approach could allow us to advance the field of community ecology by providing essential information on the species that assure the stability of natural or semi-natural habitats of conservation concern.