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Land is an essential building block of civilization yet its contribution to our quality of life is perceived and valued in starkly different and often incompatible ways. Conflicts about land use are intensifying in many countries. The world has reached a point where we must reconcile these differences and rethink the way in which we use and manage the land. The evidence presented in…

An outlook is a vantage point, a platform, a perspective; it broadens our vistas and allows us to examine our prospects, both present and future. It is within this broader frame of thinking that the Global Land Outlook (GLO) aims to present a unique perspective on one of the Earth’s most precious assets: land.

The current pressures on land are huge and expected to continue growing: there is rapidly escalating competition between the demand for land functions that provide food, water, and energy, and those services that support and regulate all life cycles on Earth. The numerous approaches, technologies, and practices highlighted in this Outlook serve as a timely reminder of…

Changes in land productivity are the result of environmental conditions and/or land use and management that impacts the quantity and quality of terrestrial ecosystem services. A persistent decline in land productivity points to the long-term alteration in the health and productive capacity of the land, the basis for economic growth and sustainable livelihoods.

Our perceptions of land are not only a response to the outside world, but also a cause and an effect of cultural filtering, by which certain phenomena feature prominently, while others recede into the background. In other words, the less visible the elements of land are to a particular stakeholder, the less meaning they have for that person and perhaps result in a lack of awareness as to their…

By approximately 6,000 years ago, agricultural expansion had spread across most continents, leading to the clearing of native vegetation and to the culling, or domestication, of herbivores. Native flora and fauna were replaced with intensive crop and livestock management practices as human populations grew and became denser. Starting around 1750, the transformation of land started to…