25-10 - Flipbook - Page 62
Hephzibah
Ministries
The rewilding milestone Earth has already passed
Sustainability and food researchers Joseph Poore, Hannah Ritchie and Charles Godfray
look at places where shrinking farmland has freed up land for nature 3 and ask how far
the trend could go.
Throughout the 20th Century, humanity demanded more and more land leading to the
loss of vast areas of natural forest and grassland. Today, around half the world's land is
farmed, used to grow crops or graze animals.
However, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global agricultural land use peaked in the early 2000s and has been slowly falling ever since.
Around the world, farmland is being replaced by grasslands, trees and bush. Wild animals are returning to abandoned pasturelands in areas they had once dominated.
Reaching "peak agricultural land" does not mean the problem of deforestation is
solved. Growing demand for products like beef, soy, cocoa and palm oil has put increasing pressure on land across South America, South East Asia and Africa. In the last
decade, the world lost an area of tropical forest twice the size of Spain.
Still, acre-for-acre across the world there has been yet more farmland abandonment,
driven by reforestation in Europe and North America and the abandonment of pastures
in Australia and Central Asia.
There are a few different reasons for this. Firstly, farming has become more efficient. The
use of improved seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation has in recent decades vastly
increased how productive the land we farm is, doubling, tripling and even quadrupling
yields depending on the crop and country. Since 1961, FAO data shows that productivi-
Joseph Poore, Hannah Ritchie and Charles Godfray
