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IT’S AN odd juxtaposition that’s starting to pop up in far-flung places around the world. Across the hilly regions of China, the scars of agriculture are being covered by a messy mix of trees and shrubs. In parts of Iran, Australia and Kazakhstan, wild animals are reclaiming swathes of abandoned pasture. And in Portugal, Chile and Argentina, abandoned farms serve as lifelines that connect fragments of intact wilderness.

The landscapes are different but all are evidence of a startling new trend. For the first time on record, the world’s farmland is shrinking. Every two years, an area roughly the size of the UK is abandoned. Has humanity’s insatiable land grab hit a turning point? And can we use this opportunity to build a world where farming has a smaller footprint, and nature gets a chance to rebound from the huge toll we have inflicted upon it?

For most of the 20th century, agriculture constantly spread out. By the 1990s, farms occupied 38 per cent of the world’s land. The impact on ecosystems is well documented: .

Deforestation is still occurring rapidly in the tropics, making way for cattle, palm and soya, but by drawing on recent data from the Food and Agriculture Organization . The total area of cropland and pasture is now shrinking. This is particularly true in temperate areas and drylands, but also in some parts of the tropics (see map). So far this century, more land has been left to return to nature worldwide than has been cleared.

Among the factors driving the trend are the choices we make every day as consumers. We rarely think of it while we’re standing in the shops, but preferring cotton or synthetics to wool, say, has far-reaching consequences. One hectare of land can produce 300 kilograms of wool, or 2000 kilograms of cotton, while synthetic fabrics require essentially no land.

Globally, demand for polyester increased four-fold during the 1990s, and wool demand fell 40 per cent. Wool prices collapsed. Sheep farmers around the world, particularly those who were on degraded pasture or couldn’t diversify, abandoned their farms. In Australia and New Zealand, two major wool-producing countries, over 60 million hectares of pasture have been abandoned since 1990. The trend continues today.

The switch away from wool has transformed vast regions. Take south-west Australia for instance – home to the world’s largest Mediterranean woodland of fragrant eucalyptus, to dry sandy heaths, wet forests and swamps harbouring rare, colourful cockatoos, carnivorous marsupials and unique amphibians like the sunset frog. Eighty-nine per cent of the land was once cleared for crops and for pastures to sate the booming wool trade. Now, consumer preferences for cotton and synthetic fabrics, and clever manoeuvring by conservation organisations, are driving change.

North-east of Perth is White Wells, a 69,000-hectare sheep farm. The area isn’t ideal for farming – there are dense shrubs and the water supply is poor – so the farm quickly became unprofitable when wool prices collapsed. A conservation charity called Bush Heritage saw an opportunity to purchase a property that still had ecological value. They removed the last stray sheep, reduced introduced species, and renamed it the Charles Darwin Reserve. Today, it is an island of natural vegetation traversing different biogeographical regions, with salt lakes, old river systems, open acacia shrublands, and eucalyptus forests – a sanctuary for almost 700 species of plant and 230 animals, including the threatened malleefowl and shield-backed trapdoor spider.

“Intensive farming comes with an environmental burden but there is another side to the story”

In north-eastern Iran, abandoned pastures have given two iconic species a new lease on life. The region is one of the last known refuges of the Asiatic cheetah, where a population of fewer than 40 individuals is hovering on the brink of extinction. Years of hunting and expanding agriculture have contracted and fragmented their range, but the tide is turning. “Reduced grazing and pasture abandonment are becoming evident on the ground in parts of Iran,” says Mohammad Farhadinia, co-founder of the Iranian Cheetah Society. In Miandasht Wildlife Refuge, a critical area for the cheetah, livestock numbers have fallen from 50,000 in the 1990s to below 15,000 today.

This has allowed another local species, the Persian gazelle, to make a recovery. In Miandasht alone, gazelle numbers have gone from less than 300 in the early 2000s to an estimated 1300 today. The cheetah preys on the gazelle, raising hopes that it will also recover. For this, the Iranian Cheetah Society is working with the Iranian Department of Environment to buy inexpensive abandoned land and turn it into national parks. Greater awareness and anti-poaching enforcement are urgently needed to make the most of this opportunity.

Iran is a classic example of intensification. As in Mongolia and other Central Asian countries, pastoralists who eked out a living off land that provided minimal incomes have migrated to urban areas. Meanwhile, intensive systems elsewhere are occupying significantly less land to deliver the same amount of protein. Of course, intensive farming comes with its own environmental burden, such as fertiliser run-off into rivers and lakes and increased use of pesticides. But Miandasht shows another side to the ecological story. suggests that globally, farmland intensification saved 27 million hectares from being cleared between 1965 and 2004.

With careful planning, some environmental costs of intensification can be managed. Precision farming, for example, uses information on soil, the climate and crops’ potential to absorb nutrients to calculate the exact amount of fertiliser needed. Pesticides can be curbed by using integrated pest control, which mixes mechanical tools like traps with biological controls like natural predators. There are major animal welfare concerns about intensive livestock farming – particularly issues arising from confinement, breeding for short, productive lives and the use of hormones. Options to boost efficiency and improve welfare are lacking, and the only real solution may be to radically change our diets (see “The future is vegan“).

Perhaps one of the last century’s most significant changes to land use came with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Collective farms broke down, machinery and livestock were sold off, and marginal agriculture, dependent on state subsidies, quickly became unprofitable. Farm workers moved into cities, abandoning 45 million hectares of cropland and an unknown but large amount of pasture.

In the immediate aftermath, it looked as though wildlife would suffer. The saiga antelope’s prized horns (pictured above) became a key source of income for local people, and hunting drove numbers to critically low levels. The sociable lapwing, an endangered bird that migrates from the Middle East to the grass steppes of Central Asia, also suffered: it depends on grazed grass to nest and eats the insects attracted to the saiga’s manure.

Double whammy

In this, a team from the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and Frankfurt Zoological Society saw a unique opportunity to protect two species at once. Working with the government of Kazakhstan they protected 5 million hectares centred on the saiga’s migration range in an area called the Altyn Dala. “There was room to manoeuvre because people had left the area, and the newly formed government was able to develop effective regulations,” says E. J. Milner-Gulland, chair of the Saiga Conservation Alliance. Coupled with anti-poaching enforcement and monitoring, the antelopes made an incredible recovery. They currently number around 150,000, up from 21,000 in 2003.

The lapwing’s breeding success has also increased, according to the RSPB. Unfortunately, the birds now face another challenge: being poached at their wintering grounds in Kuwait. Nonetheless, what happened in Kazakhstan shows how smart policies can turn farmland abandonment into a good news story for the environment.

For most governments, however, concerns over food security mean abandonment is seen as negative, so they design policies to avoid returning farmland to nature. Under the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, for instance, farmers are paid for each acre maintained in farming condition – even if the land is unprofitable. And in Western Australia, the Land Administration Act makes it difficult for farmers to derive income from sources other than livestock. Policies like these were born in an era when a greater amount of cultivated land signified a better safeguard against famine. With higher yield farming and more international trade, they are increasingly in need of revision.

In Australia, there are calls for change. Partnership for the Outback, run by a number of NGOs including Bush Heritage, is seeking new legislation that would allow farmers to make money from tourism or environmental stewardship. They want conservation to be recognised as a valuable and economically viable use of land in its own right.

“There is a huge opportunity for proactive conservation agencies to help restore marginal and abandoned lands,” says Luke Bayley from Bush Heritage. This may mean completely restoring ecosystems or redesigning farms to protect biodiversity. “Another critical element of conservation is the ability to bring families back into the landscape, create economic opportunities and engage regional people.” Indeed, for conservation to succeed, it often has to deliver benefits for people.

In Portugal’s Côa Valley, upland farming was gradually abandoned after it became uncompetitive. Farmers needed a financial way out, and conservation organisations provided that by purchasing their land when no other buyers were in the market. For those looking to stay, opportunities emerged from tourists, drawn by the pristine valleys and sightings of returning deer, wolves and black vultures.

I witnessed the benefits of novel policies first hand in 2014, when doing research in Lanzhou, in China. The booming city was at the heart of a Grain for Green area, a subsidy programme which has invested more than $60 billion dollars to revegetate 32 million hectares since 1999 in an effort to alleviate poverty and restore ecosystems. Responding to flooding, soil erosion and desertification, the government paid farmers on sloping land to plant trees, shrubs and grasses. The farms were hard to mechanise. Their low yields often provided subsistence-level incomes. But the new subsidies allowed farmers to migrate to cities or derive greater off-farm income. Improving the biodiversity of these regions will take much more work, but already household incomes have risen in almost all areas under the programme.

These examples of shrinking farmland present a narrative where the return of low productivity land to natural ecosystems can be a positive, not a negative change. They paint a picture of a new agricultural system, where we embrace high yield technologies, where we don’t keep unproductive farmers producing, and where we as consumers avoid products that use large amounts of land. The beginning of this century could mark the point when we began sharing more, not less of our planet with the other species that inhabit it.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Back to the wild”