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Brazil is the world's leading coffee exporter, contributing billions of dollars to the global food economy. Yet, a majority of Brazilian coffee farms are operated by 'smallholders', producers with relatively small properties and primarily reliant on family labor. While previous work indicates that climate change will decrease the area suitable for coffee production in Brazil, no study has assessed the impacts of climate change on coffee yields or the relative exposure and vulnerability of coffee producing regions to changes in climate hazards (climate-associated losses in yield). To address these knowledge gaps, we assess the sensitivity of coffee yields to temperature and precipitation variation from 1974 to 2017 to map coffee climate hazards. Next, we identify which coffee producing regions in Brazil have the highest exposure to climate hazards due to high dependence of coffee production as a proportion of agricultural area. Finally, we generate a Vulnerability Index to identify which regions are theoretically least able to adapt to climate hazards. Our study finds that since 1974, temperatures in Brazilian coffee growing municipalities have been increasing by ~0.25 °C per decade and annual precipitation has been decreasing during the blooming and ripening periods. This historical climate change has already resulted in reductions in coffee yield by more than 20% in the Southeast of Brazil. Minas Gerais, the largest coffee producing state in Brazil, has among the highest climate hazard and overall climate risk, exacerbated by ongoing coffee expansion. Additionally, many municipalities with the lowest adaptive capacity, including the country's mountainous regions, also have high climate exposure and hazards. Negative climate hazard and exposure impacts for coffee producing regions could be potentially offset by targeting climate adaptation support to these high-risk regions, including research, extension, and credit subsidies for improved coffee varieties, irrigation, and agroforestry and diversifying agricultural production., Environmental Research Letters, 15 (10), ISSN:1748-9326, ISSN:1748-9318

Governing land use to achieve sustainable outcomes is challenging, because land systems manifest complex land use spillovers—i.e. processes by which land use changes or direct interventions in land use (e.g. policy, program, new technologies) in one place have impacts on land use in another place. The ERL issue ‘Focus on Leakage: informing Land-Use Governance in a Tele-coupled World’ builds on discussions in an international expert workshop conducted in Berlin in November 2017 to explore innovative ways to improve our understanding of how governance interventions, new technologies and other factors can affect land-use change both directly and indirectly through spillovers. This editorial starts by clarifying the definitions and relationships between land-use spillover, indirect land use change—a form of spillover where land use change in one place is caused by land use change in another place—leakage—a form of land use spillover, which is caused by an environmental policy (e.g. a conservation or restoration intervention), and the spillover reduces the overall benefits and effectiveness of this intervention—, and land use displacement processes. We then use this terminology to summarize the individual contributions of this special issue and conclude with lessons learned as well as directions for future research.

In the US, there is growing interest in producing more beef from cattle raised in exclusively pasture-based systems, rather than grain-finishing feedlot systems, due to the perception that it is more environmentally sustainable. Yet existing understanding of the environmental impacts of exclusively pasture-based systems is limited by a lack of clarity about cattle herd dynamics. We model a nationwide transition from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates. If grass-fed systems include cropland-raised forage, a definition that conforms to typical grass-fed certifications, these supplemental feeds can support an additional 34 million cattle to produce up to 61% of the current beef supply. Given the potential of forage feed croplands to compete with human food crop production, more work is required to determine optimal agricultural land uses. Future US demand in an entirely grass-and forage-raised beef scenario can only be met domestically if beef consumption is reduced, due to higher prices or other factors. If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems., Environmental Research Letters, 13 (8), ISSN:1748-9326, ISSN:1748-9318

Environmental Research Letters, 8 (4), ISSN:1748-9326, ISSN:1748-9318