1 Global distribution of farms, area operated and dietary energy production
2 Changes in mean and median farm sizes from the 2000s to the 2020s by country income group
3 Land management vs land-use change interventions by type of policy instrument
A1 Number and size of agricultural land holdings
FIGURES
1 World agricultural land area by main category, 2023
2 Land-use change in cropland and forest land by region and subregion, 2001–2023
3 Spectrum of land degradation and restoration pathways
4 Sources of growth in world agricultural output by decade, 1961–2020
5 Drivers of agricultural land use and management
6 Key indicators of land degradation tracked by SDG Target 15.3
7 Agricultural history in relation to options of land degradation baselines
8 Agroecological yield gaps for ten major crops, 2020
9 Estimated annual and average production losses due to land degradation by income group
10 Population hotspots exposed to degradation-induced yield losses and all-cause yield gaps
12 Hotspots of abandoned cropland (1992–2015) and existing cropland (2020)
13 Distribution of 571 million farms by region, 2025
14 Global share of farms and area operated by farm size
15 Proportion of holdings and area operated by region
16 Proportion of holdings and area operated by country income group
17 Mean and median farm sizes by country income group
18 Share of dietary energy, proteins and fats supplied by crop production by farm size
20 Share of dietary energy, proteins and fats supplied by crop production by region and farm size
21 Contribution of different farm sizes to global dietary energy production by crop group
22 Average soil organic carbon debt by farm size
23 Soil organic carbon debt, percentage of native condition
25 Global increase in selected agri-environmental policies, 1960–2022
26 Potential effects of additional policymaking across countries and land cover types
BOXES
1 Beyond farm size: matching policy with farm classification
2 Historical context of land degradation responses
3 Influence of urban proximity on agricultural land prices in France
4 Land tenure enables land stewardship and food security
5 Legal barriers to women’s land rights: gaps, implications and opportunities for reform
6 Measuring sustainable productivity gains: SDG Indicators 2.3.1 and 2.4.1
7 Debt-based approach to assessing human-induced land degradation
9 From trade-offs to synergies: rethinking land sparing vs land sharing
10 Estimating global farm size distributions
11 Land distribution: quantity versus quality?
12 Food provisioning within a globalized agrifood system
13 Revisiting the inverse farm size productivity relationship
14 Scale dependencies in exposure to water stress and water consumption
15 Exposure of global agricultural land to future extreme weather
16 Land market development in sub-Saharan Africa
17 Beyond tenure: Key enablers of sustainable land management
18 Context matters when trying to reverse scale-dependent pathways of degradation
19 China’s Loess Plateau: reviving ecosystems and rural livelihoods
21 Differential impacts of deforestation regulations by farm size
22 The Great Green Wall: restoring lands and livelihoods in the Sahara and the Sahel
23 Implementing sustainable land management: lessons from Morocco and Ecuador
24 Synthesis overview of policies that improved land conditions
