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The FEWscapes scenarios are ambitious because they rose from an ambitious question: what would it take to achieve big-picture goals for food, energy, water and ecosystems in the Upper Mississippi River Basin simultaneously, particularly under an increasingly different climate?
The big-picture “goals” we loosely targeted came from U.S. federal government agencies at the time of the scenarios’ development:
- Food: Increase agricultural production by 40% by 2050, a target proposed by U.S. Department of Agriculture;
- Energy: Achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, a target set by the presidential administration at the time;
- Water: Reduce nutrient loss in the Mississippi River Basin by 45% by 2035, a target set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and
- Ecosystems: Conserve at least 30% of land for wildlife habitat by 2030, a target set by the presidential administration at the time.
Is it feasible to meet goals like these all at once?
While hypothetical visions for ways land use and climate change could unfold over the next few decades, the scenarios provide real implications for policy and management decisions today, especially for those that are trying to hit ambitious targets. The following are some of the key implications.
Change can happen fast, and transformative change is necessary
A bottom-line insight from the scenarios is a need for transformative rather than incremental land-use change to reach any of the goals for food, energy, water, and ecosystems, let alone all of them together.
We know what you’re thinking. Transformative change? Impossible!
However, transformation can happen fast.
Consider how corn ethanol reshaped American agriculture; how smartphones and the internet transformed our lives; how Green Revolution seeds and fertilizers upended crop production around the world. All these transformations happened over the course of just a few decades.
At the same time, ecosystem responses to rapid change can happen much more slowly.
Despite the significant landscape and societal changes that occur in the scenarios, none of the scenarios hit the targets for food production, low-carbon energy, water quality, and ecosystem health that guided our scenario development process. However, a few came close for certain targets.
- America’s Pasture achieves a 36.6% increase in food production in a wetter climate with less warming, which is just shy of the 40% increase target established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
- Cropland Conservation in a drier and hotter climate gets the closest to the 45% nutrient loss reduction target set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the Mississippi River Basin. It achieves a 39% reduction in nitrate concentration and 36.2% reduction in nitrate leaching.
- All scenarios, and especially Restoration Agriculture, have significant increases in perennial biomass, a proxy for increased habitat, which indicates multiple approaches can make progress toward the target to conserve 30% of land for biodiversity.
Achieving the goals will also require averting the worst-case climate projections through climate mitigation strategies. Our model results illustrate that it will be difficult to adapt to climate change and achieve goals for food, energy, water, and ecosystems through land-use change alone.
Ultimately, the FEWscapes scenarios demonstrate that planning for a future based on today’s status quo will be inadequate. Accounting for changes—whether gradual or sudden—in policies and management strategies is necessary to navigate the path toward a desirable future.
And, if decision-makers and practitioners want to achieve the targets by 2050, they may need to consider even more profound transformations than the ambitious scenarios we developed.
Water Quality Improvements Will Take a Long Time
Legacy nutrients are nutrients that have built up over decades and centuries in our soils, and they are slow to disappear. Our model results confirm the persistence of phosphorus and nitrogen in the system, even despite transformational changes.
In fact, only one scenario, Restoration Agriculture, reduces phosphorus runoff at all.
The story is similar for nitrogen. Only one scenario, Cropland Conservation, makes significant improvements in reducing nitrogen loss.
It may be surprising that the natural vegetation and perennial agriculture in America’s Pasture and Restoration Agriculture do not reduce nitrogen loss as quickly as may be expected for these land uses. A reason for the slowed progress is these land-use conversions took place on former cropland with an abundance of legacy nitrogen. The model results demonstrate that, even with this conversion, it will take a while for systems with perennial and natural vegetation to remove this excess legacy nitrogen.
The drawdown of nitrogen happens more quickly in Cropland Conservation because cover crops and saturated buffers are a quicker fix for this nutrient, and these practices are applied to more of the landscape in a relatively short period of time, compared to the other scenarios. So, the pace and scale of practice adoption play key roles. That said, beyond 2050, the other scenarios start catching up with Cropland Conservation.
Overall, the model results showcase the need for diverse and aggressive strategies to draw down both phosphorus and nitrogen levels. Each nutrient requires a different set of approaches.
Dietary Choices Will Ultimately Dictate Future Food Production
The Upper Mississippi River Basin is capable of producing a lot of food and biofuel, and it will be up to current and future generations to determine what crops to prioritize.
In the scenarios, dietary preferences and patterns largely dictate what foods farmers produce, which drives future food production. Changing diets are connected to the changes that occur on the landscape.
For example, in Restoration Agriculture, while there is less agricultural land by 2050, Americans consume less meat and dairy, which means food production is relatively unchanged between 2020 and 2050.
Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns will also impact food production. A more extreme climate trajectory will make it harder to achieve food production goals, no matter the changes that happen on the landscape. But if there is less warming in the future, it is possible to increase food production and make progress on the other goals.
For instance, in America’s Pasture, where the transformation is a shift toward grazing agriculture, if the climate is wetter but with less warming, food production increases the most of all the scenarios. This scenario with this climate also sees notable improvements in carbon storage in the ecosystem, perennial biomass for biodiversity, and sediment runoff reductions.
Sustaining Biofuel Energy Production Means Food, Water, and Ecosystem Tradeoffs
Perhaps not surprisingly, whether corn ethanol remains a significant part of the national energy portfolio determines how much biofuel can be produced into the future. It has a bit of an “on/off switch” effect—if society continues to prioritize biofuel, farmland can grow it.
However, the future of biofuel production will influence how much progress can be made toward goals for improving water quality, food production, and biodiversity.
Farmland continues to grow corn ethanol in two scenarios, Cropland Conservation and Hotspots for Transformation, due to demand for sustainable aviation fuel. But these scenarios see less improvement in food production, sediment loss, and phosphorus runoff than the other two. Cropland Conservation also has the smallest improvement in perennial biomass, a proxy for habitat, since so much farmland is used for producing corn ethanol.
Moreover, biofuel production cannot escape future climate impacts. The model results for Cropland Conservation show that, if the climate trends toward the hotter and drier end of the spectrum, biofuel production will not be as high as it could be under a less hot, but wetter climate.
We Can Improve Habitat, Regardless of the Climate
Perennial biomass served as a proxy indicator for habitat in the FEWscapes scenarios. Perennial biomass refers to the amount of perennial vegetation—often in the form of intact prairies, forests, or wetlands—on the landscape that can support a variety of plant and animal species.
All scenarios make big gains in perennial biomass, regardless of climate.In Cropland Conservation, the worst scenario for perennial biomass, its total quantity still increases by at least 40 percent from today.
This overall improvement for habitat across the scenarios is driven in part by the increase in atmospheric carbon, due to climate change, which increases the speed at which natural vegetation grows.
The bottom line of the perennial biomass model results is multiple approaches can make progress toward goals for improving biodiversity.