Challenge

© Rabin Chakrabarti

The biosphere provides all species with food and shelter and things like cloth, paper and energy. Nature also performs services such as water purification and climate regulation - so-called ecosystems services.

Yet human use of this bioproductivity is perhaps already outstripping the planet's capacity to cope. 

Overharvesting, climate change, ocean acidification, soil degradation, biodiversity loss and other factors threaten the biosphere's productivity.

Use is also unevenly distributed, leaving billions of people with inadequate resources. 

We're likely to need interventions to restore environments such as soils, reduce damaging activities (for example over-fishing and over-intensive agriculture), enhance yields sustainably (eco-intensification) and manage consumption (for example by cutting levels of meat in diets). 

Yet political processes focus only patchily on these critical issues.

How to feed a growing population is quickly emerging as a priority issue for governments and the international community. There's been much talk of methods for increasing yield, but little attention on the multiple threats to bioproductivity.

Research questions

• What level of sustainable harvesting is possible?
• How can we ensure humankind doesn't exceed this level - while everyone gets their share?
• What are the consequences of failure?

Use of the research

The research will pull together evidence on the threats to bioproductivity and for the first time identify a level of sustainable harvest. Interventions and campaigns will emerge from this research - for example on diet. The research will help shape Friends of the Earth's food campaigning which is led by the organisation's Land, Food and Water Security Programme.