Abstract
Human populations have a tendency to sprawl. Just look out the plane window as you leave any airport and you will likely see a city blending with agricultural fields for miles. With the aid of satellite imagery, this pattern can be witnessed on a global scale, revealing that urban and agricultural areas now make up over 40 percent of the Earth’s land surface. Sprawl is also a critical issue for the energy sector. Energy sprawl is the product of the amount of energy produced and the land-use intensity of production. Production is the terawatt hours per year of energy and intensity is the square kilometers of habitat given over to that production.
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Notes
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Acknowledgments
We thank Paul C. West and James S. Gerber (Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota), Navin Ramankutty (Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia), and Larissa Jarvis and Dany Plouffe (Land Use and Global Environment Research Group, McGill University) for providing technical assistance on agricultural and biofuel expansion threats; Bennett Holiday, Bob Barnes, and Bryan Woodman for helpful discussions; and all the data providers who publically provide their data, thus enabling research like ours. Funding for our analysis was provided by The Nature Conservancy, Anne Ray Charitable Trust, and The Robertson Foundation.
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Oakleaf, J., Kennedy, C.M., Baruch-Mordo, S., Kiesecker, J.M. (2017). Geography of Risk. In: Kiesecker, J.M., Naugle, D.E. (eds) Energy Sprawl Solutions. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-723-0_1
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