Production- and consumption-driven spatially explicit hotspots of global cropland soil erosion

Soil erosion threatens global agricultural and environmental sustainability. Previous studies connected soil erosion to supply chains by using national aggregates, but this approach lacks crop-specific and spatially precise responsibility allocation. Here, we integrate 0.05° gridded cropland soil erosion data, crop distributions, and a physical-unit Food and Agriculture Biomass Input-Output (FABIO) model to trace soil erosion footprints across 123 crop sectors and 187 economies in 2019. We found that ∼30% of hotspots (southern Brazil, southwestern China, and the central United States) contribute >90% of total soil erosion. Furthermore, global supply chains shape convergent consumption among major economies, with agricultural imports predominantly sourced from neighboring regions and Brazil. We showcase the hotspots driven specifically by international trade. Our study provides the first subnational-scale quantification of the consumption drivers of cropland soil erosion hotspots, highlighting the imperative for multi-scale governance frameworks spanning local to global scales to regulate production-consumption dynamics effectively.