Whole Earth Land Use

Whole Earth Land Use is a simple emoji-based infographic project offering some visualisations of how much of the Earth's total or habitable land area is consumed by various natural and human-made endeavours. You can choose between a 12x12 emoji grid, which should fit comfortable on a smart phone screen, or a 24x24 grid which is better suited for larger screens.

Data

Big picture

The visualisations are all based mainly on the data available from:

Specifically, the numeric values used are as follows.

• Oceans occupy 361 million km²
• Forests occupy 40 million km²
• Livestock occupy 37 million km²
• Barren land occupies 28 million km²
• Shrub occupies 17 million km²
• Glaciers occupy 15 million km²
• Crops occupy 11 million km²
• Freshwater occupies 1.5 million km²
• Urban and built up areas occupy 1.5 million km²

Note that the "livestock" total includes not just land occupied by the animals themselves but also land used to grow food with which to feed them. The "crops" total includes only to crops grown to feed humans. Also note that "Urban and built up areas" includes not just cities, towns villages etc. but also the associated infrastructure, e.g. solar farms, wind farms, water treatment plants etc. are counted here.

Different livestock animals

The Our World in Data link above does not break the 37 million km² occupied by livestock and their feeding down into different animal species. I have found it surprisingly difficult to find good data on this. Usually this information is presented in the form of "how much land is needed to produce 100g of beef protein vs 100g of chicekn protein" or similar, not "how much land is actually being used for cows vs how much land is actually being used for chickens".

The best I've found so far is a publication by the German government statistics office:

Figure 1 in this report has a graph entitled "Feed consumption and land use of domestic livestock 2017". Despite the "domestic" in the title, part of the graph is labelled "Land use domestically and abroad". I don't know if "abroad" means the whole world, the rest of the EU, the countries that Germany imports meat from, or something else entirely. It's not ideal. If you know of a better source, please email me.

From that figure I extracted the following percentages:

• Dairy cows account for 36% of livestock land use
• Beef cattle acount for 22.8% of livestock land use
• Poultry account for 13.6% of livestock land use
• Fattening pigs account for 16.8% of livestock land use
• Calves account for 8.7% of livestock land use
• Sheep and horses account for 2.2% of livestock land use

I summed dairy cows, beef cattle and calves up to get 67.5% total for cows. These percentages are then used to represent the 37 million km² reported as used for livestock by Our World in Data with an appropriate number of cow, chicken, pig and sheep emojis.

Code

Coming soon.