How many hectares of land on earth

On the other hand, making a new house highly energy efficient does not by itself make the house Footprint neutral, unless at the same time it causes reduction in other existing Footprints. This Footprint reduction must be larger than the Footprint of building and occupying the new house. Global hectares are the accounting unit for the Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity accounts. These productivity weighted biologically productive hectares allow researchers to report both the biocapacity of the earth or a region and the demand on biocapacity the Ecological Footprint.

A global hectare is a biologically productive hectare with world average biological productivity for a given year. Global hectares are needed because different land types have different productivities. A global hectare of, for example, cropland, would occupy a smaller physical area than the much less biologically productive pasture land, as more pasture would be needed to provide the same biocapacity as one hectare of cropland.

Because world productivity varies slightly from year to year, the value of a global hectare may change slightly from year to year. Suggested criteria governing methods, data sources and reporting for use when Footprint Standards are not appropriate or not yet developed. A hectare is approximately the size of a soccer field. See also global hectare and local hectare. A scaling factor that accounts for changes in the world-average yield of the same land use type over time.

Input-Output IO, also I-O analysis is a mathematical tool widely used in economics to analyze the flows of goods and services between sectors in an economy, using data from IO tables. IO analysis assumes that everything produced by one industry is consumed either by other industries or by final consumers, and that these consumption flows can be tracked.

If the relevant data are available, IO analyses can be used to track both physical and financial flows. Combined economic-environment models use IO analysis to trace the direct and indirect environmental impacts of industrial activities along production chains, or to assign these impacts to final demand categories.

In Footprint studies, IO analysis can be used to apportion Footprints among production activities, or among categories of final demand, as well as in developing Consumption Land Use Matrices.

IO tables contain the data that are used in IO analysis. They provide a comprehensive picture of the flows of goods and services in an economy for a given year. In its general form an economic IO table shows uses— the purchases made by each sector of the economy in order to produce their own output, including purchases of imported commodities; and supplies— goods and services produced for intermediate and final domestic consumption, and exports.

IO tables often serve as the basis for the economic National Accounts produced by national statistical offices. The five area types for biocapacity that support the 6 Footprint demand types are:. Cropland: Cropland is the most bioproductive of all the land-use types and consists of areas used to produce food and fiber for human consumption, feed for livestock, oil crops, and rubber. Due to lack of globally consistent data sets, current cropland Footprint calculations do not yet take into account the extent to which farming techniques or unsustainable agricultural practices may cause long-term degradation of soil.

The cropland Footprint includes crop products allocated to livestock and aquaculture feed mixes, and those used for fibers and materials. Forest land provides for two services: The forest product Footprint , which is calculated based on the amount of lumber, pulp, timber products, and fuel wood consumed by a country on a yearly basis.

It also accommodates the Carbon Footprint , which represents the carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. The carbon Footprint also includes embodied carbon in imported goods. It is represented by the area necessary to sequester these carbon emissions. The carbon Footprint component of the Ecological Footprint is calculated as the amount of forest land needed to absorb these carbon dioxide emissions.

Grazing land: Grazing land is used to raise livestock for meat, dairy, hide, and wool products. The grazing land Footprint is calculated by comparing the amount of livestock feed available in a country with the amount of feed required for all livestock in that year, with the remainder of feed demand assumed to come from grazing land. Fishing grounds: The fishing grounds Footprint is calculated based on estimates of the maximum sustainable catch for a variety of fish species.

This estimate of maximum harvestable primary production is then divided amongst the continental shelf areas of the world. Fish caught and used in aquaculture feed mixes are included. Built-up land may occupy what would previously have been cropland. A productivity weighted area used to report both the biocapacity of a local region, and the demand on biocapacity the Ecological Footprint. Hence, similar to currency conversions, Ecological Footprint calculations expressed in global hectares can be converted into local hectares in any given year e.

The central data set that calculates the Footprint and biocapacity of the world and more than nations from to the present generally with a three-year lag due to data availability. The ongoing development, maintenance and upgrades of the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts are coordinated by Global Footprint Network and its 80 plus partners.

Explore the most recent data on the Ecological Footprint Explorer open data platform data. Divide this figure by the current human population of 7 billion that's 7, million people and you get 2. If all the habitable land on Earth were equally distributed among all human beings present on the planet, this is the per capita share of good land per person. Again, however, we have not allowed for any amenities such as highways, schools, hospitals, shopping malls, stadiums, agricultural fields, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, parks, golf courses, etc.

Even so, could you live on 2. Efforts have been made to estimate the amount of land needed to sustain an average individual human link. A person living the profligate lifestyle of an average American requires almost 24 acres, ten times the world per capita share. Email address:. Thank you! The One Planet Centre How to repair our home. What is the carrying capacity of the Earth? OPLdkt2 Author archive. Previous post Next post. Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment.

Join us! University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists compiled the maps using satellite images and crop and livestock production data from countries around the world. The team presented their picture of global land use this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The maps suggest that an area roughly the size of South America is used for crop production, while even more land—7.

And with the world's population growing rapidly, the pressure is on farmers to find new land to cultivate, the study team says. The researchers also used past land-use data to create maps showing how agriculture has spread over the centuries. In , for example, just 7 percent of the world's land was used for farming.

Figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations suggest that total farmland increased by In Brazil, for example, huge areas of rain forest have been replaced by soybeans, which aren't a traditional crop in South America.

Production has been fueled by demand for soy from China. Brazil's Mato Grosso state has seen the biggest expansion of soybean farming. A study by researchers at the University of Maryland found that 72 percent of land cleared for crops in that region between and was previously pasture for livestock. So the transition may have been from forest to pasture to soybeans. SAGE researcher Amato Evan said, "If current trends continue, we should expect to see increased agricultural production at the cost of increased tropical deforestation.

Countries with the least suitable agricultural lands are likely to be the ones hardest hit by increased food demand.