Prof. Madhur Anand is making international headlines about her new, groundbreaking study.

The study found that if the world’s population adhered to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutritional guidelines, it would require one giga-hectare of additional land—roughly the size of Canada—under current farming practice. The findings were published in PLOS ONE.

The study has been making headlines internationally with stories appearing on CBC, Yahoo! News, Reddit, Health Medicine News and UPI.

She also appeared on CBC’s The Morning Edition K-W with Craig Norris on Aug. 14, and did a series of CBC Radio interviews on Aug. 17, broadcast across Canada. Her interviews hit airwaves in Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, Kamloops, Prince George/Prince Rupert, Kelowna, Saskatoon and Wei Chen’s Ontario Morning.

CBC’s popular science program Quirks & Quarks also featured the study on Aug. 17.

Read about the study.

A professor in U of G’s School of Environmental Sciences, Anand said this is one of the first papers to look at how the adoption of Western dietary guidelines by the global population would translate into food production, including imports and exports, and specifically how that would dictate land use and other consequences.

“We need to understand human and environmental systems in a coordinated manner, and this is where the interdisciplinary aspect of the work shines. This is also why we worked with an applied mathematician,” said Anand.

Anand studies global ecological changes, including impacts of climate change and land use, and modelling of human-environment sustainability.