Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2018-2019)

Finding solutions to the challenge of sustainably feeding the world’s growing population is a pressing research need that cuts across many disciplines. This NSERC Discovery application proposes to conduct a series of global assessments that will allow us to quantify how climate change may create opportunities for new land management strategies (e.g. the expansion of agriculture) that may boost global food production but may cause negative environmental consequences. For instance, while cultivating new agricultural land (called “agricultural frontiers”) may create new opportunities for food production, doing so also likely means converting land that is currently valuable forest habitat that stores a huge amount of carbon. How significant are such tradeoffs? And are there development pathways that will allow humanity to utilize agricultural frontiers without sacrificing the environment? To answer such questions, this research program aims to: (1) identify the extent and location of potential agricultural frontiers using soils and climate data; (2) explore the extent to which developing agricultural frontiers may help humanity adapt to climate change through increased food production; and (3) identify potential negative environmental consequences such as increased CO2 emissions, soil erosion and habitat loss due to deforestation and cultivation. These issues will be explored by using global data sets (including climate model outputs, soil maps, topographical information, and habitat data) that will allow us to conduct a series of spatially explicit analyses that will identify possible agricultural frontiers, what agricultural crops might be suitable for growing in these frontiers, and what the possible impacts such land use changes might have with respect to soil degradation, the loss of carbon, and biodiversity. Understanding the land use and environmental impact of developing agricultural frontiers will fill a major gap in the climate change adaptation literature that currently speculates on how shifting weather patterns may open new areas up to cultivation and that this represents a potential adaptation strategy. Since many of these so-called agricultural frontiers are in northern latitudes, this issue is particularly relevant to Canada and understanding scenarios by which these lands can be accessed sustainably shall help identify policy and development strategies that could benefit Canada economically as well as position Canada to help address global food security needs in the future.