Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. 6 This leaves what we call ‘habitable land’. 10% of the world is covered by glaciers, and a further 19% is barren land – deserts, dry salt flats, beaches, sand dunes, and exposed rocks. In the visualization we see the breakdown of global land area today. If we rewind 1000 years, it is estimated that only 4 million square kilometers – less than 4% of the world’s ice-free and non-barren land area was used for farming. Over the last few centuries, this has changed dramatically: wild habitats have been squeezed out by turning it into agricultural land. For much of human history, most of the world’s land was wilderness: forests, grasslands and shrubbery dominated its landscapes.
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