With the global population projected to increase by nearly 3 billion people by midcentury, demand for food—as well as the land and energy required to produce it—is to set to soar.
If the world doesn’t figure out ways to cultivate far more food on less land, we’ll need to convert nearly two Indias’ worth of forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems to agricultural fields, according to a new study led by World Resources Institute researchers. That, in turn, would increase annual emissions by 15 billion tons of carbon dioxide and equivalent gases—far exceeding the 4 billion tons permissible under models that hold global warming below 2 ˚C.
