Land use describes how people utilize a given piece of land, whether for farming, housing, commerce, conservation, or industry. It’s a concept that shapes everything from the price of your property to the climate of the planet. Globally, agriculture alone occupies more than a third of all land, forests cover another large share, and cities, while small by area, are expanding fast.
Land Use vs. Land Cover
These two terms often get confused, but they describe different things. Land cover is the physical surface: forest, grassland, open water, pavement. You can identify it from a satellite image. Land use is what people are doing with that surface. A satellite can show you a patch of green, but it can’t tell you whether that green is a national park, a cattle ranch, or someone’s backyard. Two plots with identical land cover (say, short grass) could have completely different land uses: one a suburban lawn, the other a sheep pasture.
This distinction matters because policies aimed at protecting the environment need to address both. A forest (land cover) might be managed for timber harvesting, recreation, or carbon storage (land use), and each of those purposes carries different consequences for wildlife, water quality, and carbon emissions.
How Global Land Breaks Down
FAO data through 2022 shows that the global shares of agricultural land, forest, and other land types have stayed relatively stable since 2000, but with notable erosion at the edges: agricultural land shrank by about 91 million hectares over that period, and forests lost roughly 109 million hectares. The land that replaced them largely falls into the “other” category, including expanding deserts and growing cities.
The regional picture varies enormously. More than half of all land in Asia (53 percent) is agricultural. Oceania sits at 45 percent, Africa at 39 percent, the Americas at 29 percent, and Europe at just 21 percent. Within that agricultural land, livestock grazing is the single largest user of land on the planet. Cropland, by contrast, occupies roughly 12 percent of all land that isn’t underwater. Crops are more productive per hectare, but grazing spreads across vast, often lower-quality terrain.
How Zoning Controls Land Use in Cities
In urban areas, land use is governed by zoning laws. These are the most common form of land use regulation, and their basic purpose is to keep incompatible uses separate from each other. You don’t want a chemical plant next to an elementary school. Most cities divide their territory into several broad zones: residential, commercial, mixed residential-commercial, industrial, and special-purpose zones for things like hospitals or parks.
Zoning goes well beyond just separating homes from factories. Within each zone, regulations dictate building height, lot size, the number of dwelling units allowed in a given area, parking requirements, building setbacks from the street, and even the number of rooms in a structure. These rules collectively determine a neighborhood’s density and character. A residential zone that requires large minimum lot sizes, for example, will produce a spread-out suburb. One that allows multifamily buildings on small lots will produce a denser, more walkable area.
Other tools sit alongside zoning. Urban growth boundaries draw a line between areas where development is encouraged and areas where it’s restricted, preventing cities from sprawling endlessly into farmland. Floor area ratio regulations cap how large a building can be relative to its lot, controlling bulk even when height limits alone might not.
Environmental Consequences of Changing Land Use
Converting land from one use to another, especially clearing forests for farming or development, is one of the largest drivers of both climate change and biodiversity loss.
On the climate side, the agriculture, forestry, and other land use sector accounted for 13 to 21 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions between 2010 and 2019, according to the IPCC’s sixth assessment report. Deforestation alone is responsible for 45 percent of emissions within that sector. When trees are cut or burned, the carbon they stored enters the atmosphere. Among all the changes a society could make to land management, reducing deforestation carries the single largest potential for cutting emissions, followed by storing carbon in agricultural soils and restoring ecosystems through reforestation.
Biodiversity takes a heavy hit as well. A large-scale study published in Nature Communications found that land use has eliminated roughly 15 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species from the average landscape outside remaining wilderness, and reduced those species’ native habitat area by about 14 percent. Some 556 individual species now face a risk of global extinction tied directly to how humans use land. Cropland is the biggest contributor to species loss, followed by pastures. The damage is especially severe in eastern North America, northern India, and parts of Southeast Asia, where intensive crop production has replaced most of the original habitat. On about 8.5 to 9 percent of the world’s land area, more than half of all native vertebrate species have already been lost.
What’s striking is that even low-intensity land use, like light grazing or selective logging, contributes meaningfully to biodiversity decline. Because low-intensity uses cover such enormous areas globally, their cumulative effect accounts for roughly 25 percent of total biodiversity loss from land use. It’s not only the most intensive farming that matters.
Sustainable Land Management
Sustainable land management refers to practices that balance productive use of land with long-term environmental health. The FAO promotes several approaches under this umbrella, including conservation agriculture (minimal soil disturbance, permanent ground cover, crop rotation), agroforestry (integrating trees into farmland to protect soil and store carbon), integrated pest management, and sustainable forest management. At the community level, farmer field schools teach these techniques in hands-on settings, and local land use planning helps communities decide how to allocate resources across a landscape.
The common thread is maintaining what ecologists call ecosystem services: the ability of land to filter water, cycle nutrients, store carbon, and support pollinators. Once soil degrades or a watershed loses its forest cover, restoring those functions is far more expensive and slower than preserving them in the first place. Agroforestry, natural regeneration of degraded land, and sound pasture management are all prioritized because they rehabilitate these services while keeping the land productive.
Urban Expansion Ahead
Cities currently occupy a small fraction of the planet’s surface, but that fraction is growing quickly. Projections show global urban land expanding by 0.6 to 1.3 million square kilometers between 2015 and 2050, an increase of 78 to 171 percent over the 2015 urban footprint. That growth will consume farmland, forests, and wetlands on the edges of existing cities, particularly in Africa and Asia where urbanization is fastest.
How that expansion happens matters as much as whether it happens. Compact, well-planned growth that builds density within existing urban boundaries puts far less pressure on surrounding ecosystems than low-density sprawl. This is where zoning, growth boundaries, and transit-oriented development intersect with the broader environmental picture. The land use decisions cities make in the next few decades will lock in patterns of energy consumption, habitat loss, and emissions for generations.