The ‘Goldilocks Hypothesis’: Misspecification, omissions and errors in ‘sparing land for nature

The "Goldilocks hypothesis" refers to the idea of “sparing land for nature” as a version of the story of Goldilocks: that there’s an amount of food production that is “just right” such that all the rest of the world’s land-base can be saved for nature while everyone will still be fed. Unfortunately, land-use policy has nothing to do with number of people who are fed, and empirically conservation policy is neither typically nor strongly connected to either agricultural yield or food policy. Here we attempt to address some of the failings of the land-sparing argument and propose alternatives attempting to address those failings, namely, in the areas of production, waste, equality and biodiversity.