查看文章

One of the major “sustainability challenges” is to manage the unprecedented demands on agriculture and natural resources to match the increasing human population and consumption of nutritious protein and calories, while dramatically decreasing the environmental footprint in order to maintain the resilience of our planet. Global nitrogen pollution is of particular concern and is already beyond the Earth system’s safe operating space. To meet the world’s future food security, food production needs to be doubled by 2050 and as such will result in further increasing human pressure on the global nitrogen cycle. We argue that there is an urgent need for re-engineering of the anthropogenic nitrogen cycle in order to find a long-term sustainable solution. Firstly, the massive production of plant protein to be upgraded to animal protein has a far too heavy water and land-use footprint to be sustainable. It seriously …