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RedditScientists estimate that 80 percent of Earth's land surface now bears the marks of human activities, from roads to crops to cell phone towers.
Under present land-use practices, studies show, society is seizing an ever-bigger share of the planet's biological resources to satisfy human demands. There is growing concern that the resulting environmental changes may seriously undermine the natural functions of terrestrial ecosystems. This could threaten their long-term capacity to sustain life on Earth by providing essential services such as food production, water and air filtration, climate regulation, biodiversity protection, erosion control and carbon storage.
"Ultimately, we need to question how much of the biosphere's productivity we can appropriate before planetary systems break down," Jonathan Foley and a group of co-authors caution in a paper published last July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Foley, director of the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, uses state-of-the-art computer models and satellite measurements to analyze links between land-use changes and environmental conditions around the world. This research has shown that agriculture is the dominant form of human land use today, with about 35 percent of all ice-free land now used to grow crops and raise livestock. That's up from only 7 percent in 1700.
The physical extent of land conversion for human activities is only part of the story, however. The intensity of such activities also matters a great deal: more intensive land use usually consumes more resources.
One of the best pictures so far of humanity's collective impact on terrestrial ecosystems comes from a new study, also in the July PNAS, by a team of European researchers. They compiled spatially explicit maps, in units of 6.2 square miles, indicating not only what types of local land use predominate around the world, but roughly how much biomass energy—or natural productivity—the various land-use practices consume. (The remaining biomass energy is available to support biological functions in all other trophic levels, or food webs, of ecosystems.)
"Our results show that humans, just one of 2 to 20 million species on the planet, use up 25 percent of the trophic energy available in all terrestrial ecosystems," says lead author Helmut Haberl of Klagenfurt University in Vienna. "That's quite a dramatic inequality. "
Patterns of human land use vary widely around the world, influenced by biophysical and socioeconomic conditions. Across large areas of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, for example, subsistence agriculture and small-scale farms are still standard. But in general, there's a steady shift toward more intensive land use today, driven by rising living standards and population growth that fuel increasing demand for goods and services.
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