Your correspondent is right to highlight the competing pressures on land in India from energy demand (The Big Read, January 21) but it is not just a problem there.
Globally, humanity faces a deepening “land crunch” that will drive conflict and instability from the local to the international level if not addressed.
Based on current approaches, the world has insufficient appropriate land to achieve climate and biodiversity goals, produce enough food and meet increasing demands for other essential goods and services. By 2050, there could be a global agricultural land deficit of 573mn hectares — almost twice the size of India. A growing, more prosperous population, the decreasing fertility of soils due to climate change and industrial farming, threatened water supplies and misguided approaches to capturing carbon emissions are exacerbating the pressures.
It’s true that renewable energy projects have larger land footprints per unit of energy than fossil fuels, but even allowing for projected future population growth and increased demand, estimated space requirements for solar energy sufficient to power the entire world are only 0.5 to 1 per cent of global land area.
The real risk is from bioenergy crops such as miscanthus or switchgrass, which require 40 to 50 times more land than solar, and upwards of 1,000 times as much land as fossil alternatives to produce an equivalent amount of energy. Unlike wind and solar, which, as you highlight, can be co-located with agriculture and on more marginal lands, bioenergy crops directly compete with food production and destroy biodiverse ecosystems.
At a time when the planet is already being pushed beyond what it can support, we cannot keep trying to produce more from an essentially finite area. Governments must act now if they want to avoid facing increasingly untenable choices such as between feeding people, meeting climate targets and preserving nature.
Transforming food systems; using barren and degraded lands better; reducing reliance on high-risk, unproven and extremely land-hungry bioenergy and carbon capture projects; strengthening enforcement of land rights; and incentivising the protection of land by financing its stewardship are among key steps to reduce the pressures on land.
Richard King
Senior Research Fellow, Chatham House, London SW1, UK
