Abandoned farmland has been increasing, with a billion acres - an area half the size of Australia - lost globally. Ecologists are increasingly pointing to the potential of these lands and of degraded forests as neglected resources for rewilding and for capturing carbon.
The scale of recent global farmland abandonment is a staggering and largely untold story. Globally, an area of land half the size of Australia, around a billion acres, has recently been relinquished, according to new research published in Science.
This vast land bank is ripe for rewilding, they say, with huge potential to improve biodiversity and capture atmospheric carbon dioxide.
And there's more. Other researchers point out that so-called “degraded” forests - meaning forests that have been logged in the past but now often stand neither productive nor protected - represent a parallel bank of unused or underused land that could assist are efforts to achieve planetary salvation. A recent study found that globally, degraded forests cover an area almost the size of Russia - that's approximately 10 percent of the world's total landmass. These forests are similarly under-explored by ecologists as reservoirs of biodiversity. And, says Yale360, they are often ignored by policy makers for their potential in future ecological restoration and carbon capture.
In the cases of both abandoned farmland and degraded forests, researchers say our preconceptions about categorizing land - as pristine forest, production forest, protected, farmland, or urban areas - too often blinds us to the environmental potential of these largely unmapped border lands, wastelands, backwoods, and no-go areas.
While the retreat from farming, for whatever reason, is the largest source of abandoned land globally, there are other causes. A good example is the abandonment of an estimated 5,800 square miles of former military training areas in Europe at the end of the Cold War. Free of troops and their hardware, many of these areas are becoming nature reserves.
The unanswered questions are about what kind of nature returns and whether - by mapping, studying, managing, and protecting these vast tracts of abandoned land - we could increase their potential to meet global goals for climate change mitigation and the restoration of species and their habitats.
Handing land back to nature is no silver bullet for either the world’s climate or biodiversity ills. But it does have huge potential if properly exploited and managed.
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