Earth Land – View per individual
Earth Land – View per individual
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Background Insights on Resource & Societal System
Understanding Global Land Use: A Per-Person Perspective
Understanding Global Land Use: A Per-Person Perspective
Grasping the size and complexity of Earth's surface is challenging from a human-scale viewpoint. This makes decision-making around land use — whether individual or collective — a difficult task.
This article breaks down how land is distributed and used globally, using a simple reference point: land per person, assuming a world population of 10 billion people. This gives a human-scale view using ares (1 are = 100 m²) — about the size of a small house footprint.
Land-Use Implications: The Case for Dietary Shifts
Land-Use Implications: The Case for Dietary Shifts
While livestock use dominates agricultural land (77%), it contributes only 18% of global calories and 37% of protein, according to UN FAO data.
If everyone adopted a plant-based diet:
Only 15 ares (1,500 m²) of land per person would be needed for crops
This would free up ~31 ares (3,100 m²) per person
Globally, that’s 31 million km² — potentially restorable to forests or used for clean energy
Units Used
Units Used
km² = 1,000,000 m²
1 M km² = 1 million km² = 1,000 billion m²
1 hectare (ha) = 100 ares = 10,000 m²
1 are (a) = 100 m² ≈ footprint of a typical house
Sources
Sources
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