Bending the curve of agricultural expansion offers a new era for biodiversity and climate

A defining feature of humanity through the Holocene has been our inexorable expansion of agriculture. This increased the supply of provisioning services from our environment, enabling dramatic population expansion and improved living standards, but at great cost to biodiversity and carbon cycling. Several lines of evidence now indicate that global agricultural extent has peaked and is declining. This paper synthesizes evidence for a new phase of human agriculture, focusing two emerging trends: agricultural intensification and the abandonment of spared former agricultural land. Together these enable diverse opportunities for restoration encompassing biodiversity gain and carbon sequestration with the potential to generate a global signal unprecedented in the Holocene, and distinct from the near-exponential agricultural expansion of the Anthropocene era to date. To realize these benefits this paper characterizes the opportunities of retreat from marginal agricultural lands, landscapes rich in biodiversity or carbon, systems with high potential for recovery or areas with enabling socio-economic conditions. While global conservation efforts have struggled to measurably bend the curve of biodiversity loss, innovations in agriculture have convincingly succeeded in bending the curve of agricultural expansion. As the dominant driver of biodiversity loss, progress towards the Global Biodiversity Framework goals will depend as much, if not more, on our management of global agriculture as it will on traditional biodiversity conservation. This article is part of the theme issue 'The biosphere in the Anthropocene'.