The first edition of The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture, published in 2011, presented up-to-date and comprehensive information and analyses on the global state, trends and challenges of land and water resources. The 2011 edition also elaborated on options and strategies for addressing evolving issues such as water scarcity and land degradation.
The second edition, published in 2021, provided an update of the knowledge base, accompanied by a suite of related recommendations and actions for decision-makers.
This 2025 edition of The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture focuses on the hidden and untapped potential of land and water resources to enhance sustainable agricultural production for main crops and food security. While the report looks at land and water in an integrated way, considering crops, rangeland, fisheries and aquaculture, as well as forests, particular attention is paid to crops through a thorough analysis of main crop production potential based on data and information derived from version 5 of the Global Agro-Ecological Zoning (GAEZ) assessment co-led by FAO and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the challenges affecting land, soil and water resources, before Chapter 2 presents the status of land, soil and water resources based on a literature review and focused analysis, using data from FAO and other sources. Chapter 3 describes and discusses the results of the GAEZ-based analysis, showing land’s suitability for main crops now and under future climate scenarios, assuming high-level input management. The methodology used in this analysis is also presented in Chapter 3 and further detailed in the Annex. The analysis focuses on soil, terrain and climatic conditions, without consideration of socioeconomic and ecological factors directly affecting potential production. However, it also provides information to support decisions on the overall geographical distribution of suitability for main crops and recommends options and actions for the sustainable use and management of land and water resources, leveraging key data and knowledge critical to supporting and informing policymaking at all levels. Chapter 3 also describes the yield gaps for main crops. Narrowing the yield gap using sustainable management options will increase food production. Examples of sustainable management options and an enabling environment to narrow the yield gap are discussed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.
Recognizing that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, the report recommends some technical options and actions for the sustainable use and management of land and water resources (see Chapter 4) and discusses the enabling conditions for such actions to be adopted by land users and scaled up (see Chapter 5).
This latest edition of The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture targets policymakers, decision-makers, experts and practitioners from government and non-governmental organizations, academia and research, producers’ organizations and the private sector; it promotes the sustainable use and management of land, soil and water resources to enable the transformation of agrifood systems to become more efficient, more resilient and more sustainable.
