The global population in 2000. Note that the legend values for each color are on a log scale. Population per pixel.
Project data

Due to the ready availability of tree leaves in many geographies, the alternative food of leaf concentrate currently has the potential to alleviate hunger in over 800 million people. It is therefore potentially highly impactful to determine the edibility of leaf concentrates, which are in the same regions as the world's most undernourished populations. Unfortunately, the toxicity of leaf concentrate for most common tree leaf types has not been screened and the cost of doing so demands a prioritization. This preliminary study explores this potential solution to world hunger by finding the forest classes most likely to offer proximate access to the world's hungry, thus providing the basis for a prioritized list of leaf types to screen for toxicity. Specifically, this study describes a novel methodology for mapping available green leaf biomass and corresponding forest classes (e.g., tropical moist deciduous forest), and their spatial relationship to the global distribution of people who are underweight. These results will be useful for developing a targeted list of tree species to conduct leaf toxicity analysis on, in the interest of developing leaves as an alternative food source for both current malnutrition problems and global catastrophic scenarios.

Source

• Fist, T., Adesanya, A. A., Denkenberger, D., & Pearce, J. M. (2021). Global distribution of forest classes and leaf biomass for use as alternative foods to minimize malnutrition. World Food Policy, 1– 19. https://doi.org/10.1002/wfp2.12030, Academia OA

## Keywords

 agriculture, edible leaves, forests, GIS, global catastrophic risk, hunger