Global land footprint of UK food and feed imports under future socioeconomic scenarios

Abstract

Globalisation in the food system has led to interdependencies between countries for food security and has distributed the environmental impacts of the food consumption. In the UK, food imports account for nearly half of domestic consumption. However, there has been limited research quantifying the UK’s current global land use footprint, and no previous work has explored how this might evolve under future scenarios. We provide an update on the historical land footprint of UK food and feed imports from 2010 to 2020 and produce spatially explicit estimates of the land footprint from 2020 to 2100. Food and feed demand, agricultural production and trade are simulated using a food system model under four global socioeconomic and climate scenarios. Using biophysical accounting, we estimate that 11 Mha of agricultural land is currently linked to UK food and feed imports. Across all scenarios, we estimate that the global land footprint of UK food and feed imports will reach 10–12 Mha of agricultural land by 2050 and 10–16 Mha by 2100. With 17 Mha of UK land currently used for agriculture, the land footprint of food and feed imports should be an important focus when evaluating the environmental consequences of UK food consumption.