Global inventory of potentially cultivable land and potentially available cropland under different scenarios and policies

Global inventory of potentially cultivable land and potentially available cropland under different scenarios and policies

To identify and investigate potential land-use conflicts and emerging trade-offs between different Sustainable Development Goals, such as food security, climate protection and biodiversity conservation, it is important to identify where land-use change and particularly the expansion of cropland could potentially take place in the future. Therefore, we provide a consistent global dataset of land potentially cultivable and potentially available for agricultural use for past and future time periods from 1980 until 2100. Based on the agricultural suitability of land for 23 globally important food, feed, fiber and first- and second-generation bioenergy crops, and high resolution land cover data, the potentially cultivable land is defined by its agricultural suitability and the (technical) feasibility of agriculture. The potentially available cropland additionally considers potential nature protection policies restricting agriculture in forests, wetlands and strictly protected areas, thereby reflecting key aims of the Sustainable Development goals and recent efforts to stop deforestation, protect the climate and preserve biodiversity.

The spatially explicit global datasets of potentially cultivable land (pcl) and potentially available cropland (pac) are available for four different time periods (1980-2009, 2010-20,39, 2040-2069, 2070-2099) under RCP2.6 and RCP8.5. The impact of irrigation on the agricultural suitability is considered by referring to current irrigations patters. However, to enable different assumptions on the irrigation of land potentially cultivable or available for cropland use, all datasets are also available for rainfed and irrigated conditions separately. Moreover, we provide a subset-version of all dataset which excludes land that is solely suitable for second-generation bioenergy crops. All datasets are available at 30 arc-seconds and 30 arc-minutes spatial resolution and aggregated at country level to enable the application in models that use aggregated data.

By serving as an input for land-use models, the data could improve the comparability of the models and their output, and increase the consistency within interdisciplinary research and integrated model coupling approaches that investigate land-use change.

Further information:

A detailed description on the methods and underlying data is available in:

Schneider. J.M., Zabel, F., Mauser, W. (2022): Global inventory of suitable, cultivable and available cropland under different scenarios and policies. Scientific Data. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01632-8

Contact:

Please contact: Julia M. Schneider ([e-mail])Department of Geography, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), Munich, Germany.