630 Landwirtschaft und verwandte Bereiche
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Human-induced environmental change represents one of the major challenges of current and future generations. To evaluate the anthropogenic impacts on the biosphere, the concept of Planetary Boundaries was developed, indicating that in case of four out of nine environmental indicators a transgression of corresponding boundaries has already taken place: Biodiversity loss, climate change, land-system change, and biogeochemical flows. Further, paleoclimate research has shown that the earth´s environment has been relatively stable for the last 12,000 years. Researchers assume that this, in geological terms, very short period – called Holocene – is now already again replaced by a new geological era: the Anthropocene, due to the tremendous impacts humans had on earth.
Our daily food consumption is slowly but surely turning into the largest environmental threat. The agricultural sector consumes 70% of the water used by humankind. The production of meat consumes enormous amounts of water compared to plants. Innovations in the area of food production are lately summarized as AgTech, agricultural technology. This encompasses all sorts of areas, ranging from drone-controlled tractors to printed hamburgers. Specifically the challenge of making use of the limited areas available in cities and maximizing crop yields has seen a recent boom in novel approaches – and quite a bit of investor finance.