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Climate & environmentEpisode 255Donut0:33

How the world's land is used: forest, farms, desert

Share of the world's 13 billion hectares of land, by use

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Guess the number: of the world's land grows crops

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0%100%
0:00 / 0:33

Source: FAO (2023 data) · 2023

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The numbersFills in as the clip plays
  1. 1Forest31%
  2. 2Grazing land25%
  3. 3Desert, ice, cities32%
  4. 4Crops12%

Narration

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Runs 0:33.

How to read this chart: Each arc is a share of the whole, and the whole is 100%. Compare arcs against the ring rather than against each other. More on donut charts.

The takeaway

Grazing land covers twice as much ground as the fields that grow crops.

The data

The numbers

Data behind “Only 12% of the world's land grows crops”
#NameValue
Forest31%
Grazing land25%
Desert, ice, cities32%
Crops12%

Source: FAO (2023 data). Covering 2023.

Explore this chart

The chart from the video, redrawn live from its data. Scrub to any moment, or play it again.

What the numbers show

Only about 12% of the world's land is used to grow crops. That is the fields of grain, vegetables, fruit and other plants. Grazing land is about twice as big at 25%. Forest covers 31%, and other land such as deserts, glaciers, bare rock and built areas covers 32%. Crops and grazing land together make up 37% of the land, which is the farmland share.

The numbers come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which counts land use for every country each year. Its 2023 release put world farmland at 4,800 million hectares. Of that, 1,600 million were cropland and 3,200 million were permanent meadows and pastures. Forest land was 4,050 million hectares and other land was 4,150 million.

The shares are shown out of 13,000 million hectares. That is the land FAO counts country by country, not all the land on Earth. It leaves out inland water such as lakes and rivers, and FAO's list has no entry for Antarctica. It is also not the whole surface of the Earth, most of which is ocean. So the slices show how the counted land is used, not how the planet is divided between land and water.

The World Bank compiles the same FAO data and reports farmland at 36.9% and forest at 31.1% of land area, close to the figures used here. These are estimates, not a head count. Countries define forest and pasture in slightly different ways, and some land is both. A forest can be grazed, for example. Later FAO releases revise the numbers a little, so treat each share as accurate to about a percentage point.

To read the chart, compare the four slices from largest to smallest. Other land and forest are almost the same size, each close to a third of the counted land. Grazing land is the third slice, and cropland the smallest. Grazing land has about twice the area of cropland.

A fair way to use these numbers is to compare shares, not to blame any one use. Pasture is often poor ground that could not grow crops, and the totals do not say how much food each kind of land produces.

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Transcript

  1. Only 12 percent of the world's land grows crops.

  2. In 2023, about 32 percent of the world's land was desert, ice and cities, and 31 percent was forest. Animals graze on 25 percent. Crops grow on just — 12 percent. Grazing gets twice as much.

  3. That's today's stat from NumberReels. Is 12 percent of land enough to feed a growing world? Comment your answer. Like, share and subscribe for more at numberreels.com.

Source & method

  • SourceFigures from FAO (2023 data).
  • PeriodCovering 2023.
  • ChartRendered as a donut chart.
  • ReuseFree to repost with credit. For broadcast, courses or a watermark-free copy, License this clip.
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