The Emerging Global Crisis of Land Use: How rising competition for land threatens international and environmental stability, and how the risks can be mitigated

Humanity faces a deepening ‘land crunch’ in the coming decades, as on current trends the demand for land for farming, climate change mitigation and other essential uses will increasingly exceed the availability of appropriate land. Intensifying competition for land will make international cooperation on solutions more important, but also more elusive. This report explores the drivers of the land crunch, models how the pressures associated with it could play out between now and 2050, and presents ideas for promoting more sustainable land use and cooperative land stewardship. While the crunch is, in some respects, already a contemporary phenomenon – reflecting relentless growth in resource consumption, stagnating land productivity and accelerating biodiversity loss – the pressures will continue to mount in the future. So what can and should humanity do now to prevent existing pressures on land from becoming unmanageable within decades?