“Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. The extensive land use has a major impact on the earth’s environment as it reduces wilderness and threatens biodiversity.” Land Use by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser/Our World in Data. September 2019
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, agricultural land includes croplands, pastures, orchards, vineyards, and flowering shrubs but excludes trees grown for wood or timber. Almost 33% of the earth’s total land area is used for agriculture. The rest goes to forest/shrub ( 37%), glaciers (10%) barren land such as deserts (19%) and a minuscule 1% for human urban and built-up areas.
Expanding wild habitat is mostly about taking from agriculture and giving to forests and shrub lands. But before I get to that, here’s a country-level breakdown of agricultural land, as a percentage of each country’s total land area:
Another country-level chart:
It wasn’t always thus. Per the next chart, agricultural land covers almost six times the planet’s land surface today than it did in 1600:
Then again, the planet’s human population has risen over 13-fold since 1600 (roughly 600 million in 1600 to 8 billion today). That means agricultural productivity has more than doubled over the last four centuries. Let’s double it again and give most of the land back to the wild creatures.
That’s not as crazy as it sounds. A recent study looked at the potential yields for 18 crops across the entire globe and concluded that yields in areas with low agricultural productivity could at least double through improved crop production. In the authors’ words:
“If farming practices were the same around the world then land quality would not be a constraint on farmers in poor countries. The majority of the actual yield differences would disappear if countries produced according to their potential, with a secondary role played by what crops are produced and where they are produced within the country.” Adamopoulos and Restuccia, 2022, p. 36.
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Reference:
Tasso Adamopoulos, Diego Restuccia, Geography and Agricultural Productivity: Cross-Country Evidence from Micro Plot-Level Data, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 89, Issue 4, July 2022, Pages 1629–1653, https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdab059
Links:
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.K2?end=2020&start=2020&view=bar