Global land use changes are four times greater than previously estimated

2021/05/11 by Karina Winkler, Richard Fuchs, Mark Rounsevell +1 · 25 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · #Climate change impacts on agriculture #Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management #Land Use and Ecosystem Services

paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41467-021-22702-2

openalex publication_date 2021/05/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

Abstract

Quantifying the dynamics of land use change is critical in tackling global societal challenges such as food security, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Here we analyse the dynamics of global land use change at an unprecedented spatial resolution by combining multiple open data streams (remote sensing, reconstructions and statistics) to create the HIstoric Land Dynamics Assessment + (HILDA +). We estimate that land use change has affected almost a third (32%) of the global land area in just six decades (1960-2019) and, thus, is around four times greater in extent than previously estimated from long-term land change assessments. We also identify geographically diverging land use change processes, with afforestation and cropland abandonment in the Global North and deforestation and agricultural expansion in the South. Here, we show that observed phases of accelerating (~1960-2005) and decelerating (2006-2019) land use change can be explained by the effects of global trade on agricultural production.

Citations

• Shrub Invasions of North American Semiarid Grasslands
• Harmonization of global land use change and management for the period 850–2100 (LUH2) for CMIP6

Cited by

• EcoTWIN 1.0: a fully distributed tracer-aided ecohydrological model tracking water, isotopes, and nutrients
• A global land-use data cube 1992–2020 based on the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production
• The sustainability of diets in sub-Saharan Africa: Synergies and tradeoffs between human health and the environment
• Annual 30-m maps of global grassland class and extent (2000–2022) based on spatiotemporal Machine Learning
• The birds and the trees: Avian ecosystem (dis)service perspectives and farmers' willingness to plant native trees in the agricultural landscape of the Galapagos Islands
• Global agricultural lands in the year 2015
• Human–Earth system interactions under climate change
• Characterizing land use transition in China by accounting for the conflicts underlying land use structure and function
• deFOREST: Fusing Optical and Radar satellite data for Enhanced Sensing of Tree-loss
• Range and climate niche shifts in European and North American breeding birds
• Bending the curve of agricultural expansion offers a new era for biodiversity and climate
• China’s animal-protein-rich diets are increasingly reliant on Brazil’s land and water resources
• Abandoned Railways Support Greater Functional and Phylogenetic Plant Diversity Than Adjacent Grassy Meadows in Agricultural Landscape
• Hector V3.2.0: functionality and performance of a reduced-complexity climate model
• Machine learning meets ecology: XGBoost-based prediction of endangered species habitats using multi-source environmental data
• Conceptualising and mapping polarisation trends in land systems
• Influence of landscape composition on spatiotemporal interactions between sympatric canids
• Long-term data in agricultural landscapes indicate that insect decline promotes pests well adapted to environmental changes
• Using the Nature Futures Framework as a lens for developing plural land use scenarios for Europe for 2050
• Pathogens and planetary change
• Land sparing outperforms land sharing for Amazonian bird communities regardless of surrounding landscape context
• Beyond the silos: A global evidence synthesis of biodiversity, water, food, health and climate nexus interactions
• Limited energy for microorganisms constrains carbon accrual in soil
• Agricultural workforce as a potential bottleneck of future cropland availability
• Pitfalls for the sustainability of forest transitions: evidence from Southeast Asia

Related

• A global land-use data cube 1992–2020 based on the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production
• Contextualizing the global relevance of local land change observations
• The Global 2000-2020 Land Cover and Land Use Change Dataset Derived From the Landsat Archive: First Results
• Global agricultural lands in the year 2015
• Harmonization of global land use change and management for the period 850–2100 (LUH2) for CMIP6