Abstract

Conservation will be shaped by some fairly significant forces over this century, as the human population reaches its apogee (at around 12 b.), food requirements expand in tandem, and agriculture struggles to meet these needs. How will conservation of land continue in this context, and what sorts of policies will aid in ensuring that some lands continue to exist outside of agriculture over this century? This paper reports on the results of an integrated growth model (the MAVA model) – that demonstrates how we might expect technology, population and agriculture to respond to these challenges over the next 80 years. We find that the expected slowdowns in population and economic growth indicate that the planet will reach plateaus in most forms of land exploitation in the coming century, but that policy choice will be important in determining how conservation will get through this. We examine a wide range of policies (food restrictions, land use restrictions, technology restrictions, and others) – applied over the entire century – to examine what sorts of interventions will matter for ensuring conservation in the 21st century.