Human-induced degraded land by country and land cover/land use type

The dataset presents country data of human-induced degradation by land cover/land use. The land cover layer of the Global Agro-ecological Zoning v5 (GAEZ v5) data layer (2025) was used to extract data from the human-induced degradation layer published by Coppus (2023) for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) flagship publication the State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture (SOLAW 2021). A simple mapping between GAEZ v5 land cover classes and FAO land use categories is applied as shown in Table 1 below. Countries report national land use information to FAO through a long-established statistical process, using the annual questionnaire Land Use, Irrigation and Agricultural Practices (https://www.fao.org/statistics/data-collection/general/en). The resulting data are published in FAOSTAT (https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RL) where agricultural land is defined as land used for crop cultivation and animal husbandry. Agricultural land corre-sponds to the total areas under "Cropland" and "Permanent meadows and pastures". Country codes are FAO FAOSTAT codes. The dataset also includes area aggregates for 20 countries of the Arab region (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syrian Arab Republic, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Djibouti, Somalia, Mauritania). 

Table 1. Mapping table of GAEZ v5 land cover to FAO land use categories 

References:

1) FAO The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture – Systems at Breaking Point. Main Report; Rome, 2022. https://doi.org/10.4060/cb9910en.

2) Coppus, R. The Global Distribution of Human-Induced Land Degradation and Areas at Risk - SOLAW21. Technical Background Report.; Rome, FAO., 2023. https://doi.org/10.4060/cc2843en 

3) GAEZ v5. 2025. Share of land cover class (Global ~ 1km) – GAEZ v5. https://data.apps.fao.org/catalog/iso/f7bee2f1-3a48-4e86-a1d2-387023dec046.