What is the Global Land Squeeze?

Humanity is putting unprecedented pressure on the world’s land, and barreling toward climate, biodiversity, and humanitarian crises. This pressure is driving increasing competition over finite land resources — a global land squeeze.

Over the past 100 years, natural landscapes have been radically transformed. By one estimate, 70% of grasslands, 50% of savannas, and 25% of forests worldwide have already been cleared or converted for agriculture.

Remaining natural ecosystems are now in peril, pushing the planet toward critical ecological and climatic tipping points and threatening the culture and livelihoods of many people, especially Indigenous communities.

People depend on land to produce food, feed, fiber, and fuel to support a growing world population and expanding middle class. Experts predict that agricultural land will expand by over 600 million hectares by 2050 under a business-as-usual scenario — an area twice the size of India.

Yet avoiding this mass conversion is critical to combatting the effects of climate change. When people slash and burn forests, drain wetlands, or plow up grasslands, they release into the atmosphere vast amounts of CO2 once stored as carbon in soils and plants. To hold global warming under 1.5 degrees C, we must protect what remains and restore what’s been lost.

Land is vital but finite. How can we reconcile humanity’s competing land demands with the need to combat climate change, protect biodiversity, and improve people’s lives?

Accurate monitoring is central to tackling the land squeeze. It can provide insights to support better land management by underpinning carbon markets, empowering local people to protect their land, informing land use planning, enabling companies to implement net-zero commitments, and alerting rapid responders to fires and other threats before it’s too late.

Fortunately, the amount of Earth observation data is growing exponentially — there are more drones in the sky and satellites circling Earth than ever. But this data deluge can be overwhelming to decision makers with limited technical expertise.

Lack of data is no longer the biggest barrier to change. We now face the enormous challenge of interpreting, curating, and delivering disparate data as actionable and trustworthy information.

Land & Carbon Lab doesn’t stop with monitoring. We work directly with decision makers and the organizations that support them to transform complex geospatial data into actionable information, delivering it to the right people, in the right formats, and at the right times.