A future with more people and more forest is possible. If we can take advantage of these innovations, we can bring deforestation to an end. And with the growth of technological innovations such as lab-grown meat and substitute products, there is the real possibility that we can continue to enjoy meat or meat-like foods while freeing up the massive amounts of land we use to raise livestock. In fact, the world may have already passed ‘peak agricultural land’. 4 This means that agricultural land per person more than halved, from 1.45 to 0.63 hectares. Meanwhile, the global population increased by 147% – from 3.1 to 7.6 billion. Since 1961, the amount of land we use for agriculture increased by only 7%.

Improvements in crop yields mean the per capita demand for agricultural land continues to fall. The world passed ‘peaked deforestation’ in the 1980s and it has been on the decline since then – we take a look at rates of forest loss since 1700 in our follow-up post. But there are real reasons to believe that this century doesn’t have to replicate the destruction of the last one. This might paint a bleak picture for the future of the world’s forests: the United Nations projects that the global population will continue to grow, reaching 10.8 billion by 2100. Humanity’s biggest footprint is due to what we eat, not where we live. But urban land accounts for just 1% of global habitable land. When we think of the growing pressures on land from modern populations we often picture sprawling megacities. From the chart we see that this was driven by the continued expansion of land for agriculture. In just over 100 years the world lost as much forest as it had in the previous 9,000 years. Second, it makes clear how much deforestation accelerated over the last century. Low agricultural productivity and a reliance on wood for fuel meant that large amounts of land had to be cleared for basic provisions. Even with the most basic of lifestyles compared to today’s standards, the per capita footprint of our ancestors would have been large. By 1900, there were 1.65 billion people in the world (five times fewer than we have today) but for most of the previous period, humans were deforesting the world with only tens or hundreds of millions. This emphasises two important points.įirst, it reiterates that deforestation is not a new problem: relatively small populations of the past were capable of driving a large amount of forest loss. The turn of the 20th century is when global forest loss reached the halfway point: half of total forest loss occurred from 8,000BC to 1900 the other half occurred in the last century alone. Still, more than half of the world’s habitable land was forested. You will notice in the chart that this was not only expanding into previously forested land, but also other land uses such as wild grasslands and shrubbery. The amount of land used for agriculture – land to grow crops as well as grazing land for livestock – was expanding. If we fast-forward to 1700 when the global population had increased more than ten-fold, to 603 million.

But a small global population overall meant there was little pressure on forests to make space for land to grow food, and as wood for energy. The amount of land per person that was needed to produce enough food was not small – in fact, it was much larger than today. The global population at this time was small and growing very slowly – there were fewer than 50 million people in the world. Only 10% of this was lost in the first half of this period, until 5,000 years ago. The world has lost one-third of its forest – an area twice the size of the United States. 3 10,000 years ago 57% of the world’s habitable land was covered by forest. The bar chart just below shows the earth’s surface cover just after the end of the last ice age. I have therefore excluded these categories so we can focus on how habitable land is used. You see that of the 14.9 billion hectares of land on the planet, only 71% of it is habitable – the other 29% is either covered by ice and glaciers, or is barren land such as deserts, salt flats, or dunes. This is shortly after the end of the last great ice age, through to the present day. In the chart we see how the cover of the earth’s surface has changed over the past 10,000 years. How much forest has the world lost? When in history did we lose it? Humans have been cutting down trees for millennia. This is true for some problems, such as climate change.

Many people think of environmental concerns as a modern issue: humanity’s destruction of nature and ecosystems as a result of very recent population growth and increasing consumption.

Comparison infographic