Mapping the option space for carbon sequestration, food and biodiversity in Great Britain

Due to the various negative environmental consequences of current land-use, and land’s importance for climate mitigation, environmental conservation and food security, there is a growing and urgent interest in reforming land-use in many countries. Policy objectives for tree planting to sequester carbon and the creation of protected areas to protect biodiversity require land reallocation. This leads to inevitable trade-offs between land-uses, requiring careful place-based policy design. Here, we evaluate the trade-offs between three objectives for rural land: agricultural/forestry production, carbon sequestration and biodiversity, by calculating metrics for these three objectives on a 500mx500m grid covering Great Britain (GB). We use a multi-objective optimisation to identify the land allocations that satisfy different weightings between the three objectives for given total areas of land-use conversation. Our results show that the current land-use in GB is far from optimal for any combination of objectives. We also find that it is possible to significantly improve carbon sequestration and biodiversity, even with a relatively small proportion of the land being converted to other uses, without compromising overall agricultural production, provided conversions are located carefully.