This changed my perspective of Earth 🤯 The majority of people spend most of their lives in that little grey square. That is why most people underestimate the amount of space it requires to grow food. The big problem is that 83% of the farmland is used to produce only 17% of all calories and 38% of protein. With a few simple switches, we could drastically reduce the amount of land and bring back more nature, while also solving a lot of other problems. A few notes: 1️⃣ We could reduce the red grasslands by more than half, just by skipping beef and mutton. In this scenario, there would still be beef from dairy cows. 2️⃣ Shifting to a completely plant-based diet would require less cropland, not more. 3️⃣ “But pastures should be counted as nature.” Perhaps some of it, but definitely not all. In Europe, a lot of grassland is ‘managed grassland’: a monoculture of rye grass and often even boosted with synthetic fertilizer. In other regions, the grasslands are overgrazed because the number of ruminants is too high. In both cases, grasslands are optimized for meat and dairy production instead of biodiversity. @ourworldindata does notes that there is some uncertainty regarding ‚rangeland‘ and how much of that is used for grazing. „Despite this uncertainty, most analyses conclude that nearly half of habitable land is used for agriculture.” The WRI also explains that one-third of all pasture used to be forest. And because the native grasslands are already in use, increased demand for beef and dairy leads to deforestation to create more pasture. Sources: Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2019) - “Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture” Published online at OurWorldinData Hannah Ritchie (2021) - “If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares” Published online at OurWorldinData Craig Hanson and Janet Ranganathan (2023) - “How to Manage the Global Land Squeeze? Produce, Protect, Reduce, Restore.” World Resources Institute @worldresources - @forkranger