United Nations uses research to highlight global issue

11 June 2015

United Nations uses research to highlight global issue

Lincoln University Professor Steve Wratten is one of a multi-national cohort whose work is being used by the United Nations to show how enhancing nature’s services in agriculture can help feed a burgeoning world population.

Professor Wratten, who is part of the Bio-Protection Research Centre based at Lincoln, co-authored “Significance and value of non-traded ecosystem services on farmland” with academics from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Ecosystem or nature’s services are the benefits people obtain from living things.

The article was highlighted by the website FoodTank which is helping the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to disseminate relevant research on agricultural biodiversity and ecosystem services.

The website looks at how the global issues of hunger, obesity, climate change, unemployment, and other problems can be solved by more research and investment in sustainable agriculture.

The findings of the paper, from tests carried out on New Zealand commercial farms, show total economic value is significantly greater in organic agriculture systems on a global scale than in conventional ones.

It looks at two services— biological pest control and nitrogen mineralisation in agriculture.

It found the extrapolated net value of the two services could exceed the combined current global costs of pesticide and fertiliser inputs, even if utilised on only 10 per cent of global arable area.

To meet the increasing food demand of a growing human population and their changing consumption patterns it is thought there will need to be ‘sustainable intensification’ of agriculture.

This will require many non-renewable resources (e.g., fossil fuel-based pesticides and fertilisers) to be at least partially replaced by renewable resources, such as ecosystem services based on biological control or nitrogen fixation.

“The research conveys a message to farmers and politicians that simple, cost-effective techniques can help reduce costly farming inputs by giving nature a helping hand,” Professor Wratten says.

“We have the eco-technologies; we now need political and financial support to put them into practice. After all, a recent report to the United Nations said that agroecology can double food yields in a decade; current practices cannot.”

Picture: Steve.Wratten jpg: Professor of Ecology Steve Wratten doing fieldwork.

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