Feeding Seven Billion

After last week’s trip to the symposium I think it is time to get back into the core of what this blog is about. Today I will revisit the environmental impacts of farming that I mentioned briefly in my first post. I hope to explore solutions to the following issues in future posts, but for now here are the facts: Biodiversity Agriculture is one of the biggest threats to wild plant and animal species. Maxwell and colleagues  showed that overexploitation and agriculture were the most serious threats to the 8,688 threatened or near-threatened species on the IUCN red list . Agricultural activity alone threatened 5,407 species whereas climate change was found to affect ‘just’ 1,688 in comparison. The Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew  reported that livestock farming, logging and expansion/intensification of crop farming are the biggest threats facing vascular plant species, illustrated here:  Climate change Agriculture is responsible for 18% of all gre...