site

  1. Log in
  2. New User?
  3. Help
  4. Take action now!
  1. Home
  2. Who is WWF?
  3. What We Do
  4. About Our Earth
  5. How You Can Help
  6. News
  7. Tigers
  1. Home
    1. About Our Earth

Priority places adversely impacted by agriculture

Agriculture: major impacts on species and places

Find out what WWF is doing!
Agriculture is essential to supplying our food, many of the fibres we use (like cotton) and, more and more, biofuels too.

It's also the world's largest industry, employing over one billion people and generating over one trillion dollars' worth of food annually.

And it's the largest driver of habitat and biodiversity loss around the world.
Rice terraces, Madagascar.
Agriculture is a major land use. Land for farming crops, livestock and poultry currently covers 38% of the world's total land area1 and around 50% of all habitable land. An incredible 78% of agricultural land is used for livestock production2. 
Oil palm plantation in Sabah (Borneo), Malaysia.
Expanding oil palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia pose the most significant threats to the widest range of endangered megafauna, including the Asian elephant, the Sumatran rhinoceros, and tigers.
Agricultural areas provide important habitats for many wild plants and animals.

When agricultural operations are sustainably managed, they can help preserve and restore critical habitats, protect watersheds, and improve soil health and water quality.

But when practiced without care, agriculture presents the greatest threat to species and ecosystems. Indeed, many of WWF's priority places and species are negatively impacted by agriculture.

Land conversion & habitat loss

The main impact from agriculture comes from clearing natural habitats for farming land – especially land for intensive monoculture.

Recent examples include the loss of lowland rainforests in Indonesia to oil palm plantations, and the clearing of large areas of the Amazon rainforest and Brazilian savannah for soybean and cattle production.

On top of habitat loss due to clearing, unsustainable agricultural practices are seeing 12 million hectares of land lost each year to desertification.

Wasteful water consumption

Globally, the agricultural sector consumes about 70% of the planet's fresh water – more than twice that of industry (23%), and dwarfing municipal use (8%). Between 15–35% of this water use is estimated to be unsustainable3.

Excessive water use is leaving rivers, lakes and underground water sources dry in many irrigated areas. Excessive irrigation can also lead to increased soil salinity and degraded water quality.

More information

Climate change

Crops, livestock and farming practices are significant contributors to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

For example, rice production is one of the single-largest producers of methane, while the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently stated that the livestock sector alone is responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas production.
Fertilizers, plowing and burning of agricultural residues also release greenhouse gases.

In addition, the conversion of forests to agriculture, primarily in developing countries and particularly in tropical Asia, accounts for a roughly similar percentage of greenhouse gas emissions as agriculture itself1.

Agriculture and poverty

3/4 of the world's extremely poor people live in rural areas where farming is the only option for fighting poverty and malnutrition.

Declining harvests from cleared lands push producers into surrounding wild lands rich in biodiversity.

The result is a cycle of increasing poverty and biodiversity loss.

Subsidies provided by the US and European governments to their agricultural producers also distort prices and production patterns throughout the world.

By encouraging overproduction, these subsidies drive down world prices, forcing many developing country producers to cut corners environmentally or to leave world markets altogether.

Poor people are forced into more marginal areas where their impact is greater and production is lower.

Pollution

Pesticides, fertilizers, and other toxic farm chemicals can pollute fresh water supplies, marine ecosystems, the air, and the soil. Many of these toxins have the ability to remain in the environment for generations, and many are suspected of disrupting the hormone messaging systems of people and wildlife.

Agriculture is in fact the leading source of pollution in many countries.

Genetic erosion 

The replacement of traditional and local crops and farm animals with more genetically uniform, modern varieties has caused the genetic erosion of crops and livestock species around the world. These days, just 30 crops account for 90% of calories consumed by people, while 14 animal species account for 90% of all livestock production5.
 

Other impacts

Agriculture also impacts on biodiversity through the introduction of non-native species, erosion, and sedimentation of downstream habitats including coral reefs. Overall, some 85% of agricultural land has been degraded by erosion, salinization, soil compression, nutrient depletion, biological degradation, or pollution4, and during the past 150 years, half of all agricultural topsoil has been lost as a result of unsustainable farming practices.

1. CBD/UNEP (2001) Global Biodiversity Outlook
2. Steinfeld, H., Gerber, P., Wassenaar, T., Castel, V., Rosales, M. and de Haan, C. (2006) Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options FAO
3. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis Island Press
4. WBCSD/IUCN (2008) Agricultural Ecosystems – Facts and Trends
5. UNEP (2007) Fourth Global Environment Outlook: Environment for Development Section B: State-And-Trends of the Environment 1987–2007; Chapter 5: Biodiversity

Photos and graphics © WWF or used with permission. Text available under a Creative Commons licence. RSS/Web Feeds Bookmark and Share