Of the total area that is used by humans (Agriculture, Urban and Built-up Land),
- urban and built-up land is 1m km²,
- agriculture is 48m km²,
so agriculture is 48 of 49 millions km² used, that’s 98%. The remaining 2% are all streets and housing and other infrastructure together.
This does not even seem close to the truth. Just a gut feeling though, not proof of anything.
It does seem to be missing mining/quary land, logging operations, oil fields, non-urban infrastructure (like highways), and parkland that kinda straddles human and wild land.
Not sure any of those other than the parks would add up to over 1%, though.
Around where I am, I could believe it, though. Outside of the cities, there’s many areas where you just see farm fields split up by roads and power lines from horizon to horizon.
It’s close, I worked on a paper pretty much doing exactly this a while back and we had included all of this, metal and oil extraction, all roads, railways, even golf courses on top of your housing. We were at 1.2% of world’s land usage. So I’m sure whatever they got is sensible.
Logging might be missing, but in our data logging was part of forests. So it ties in that regard.
Most unsustainable “logging land” is basically turned into grazing land. Brazil and the cut rainforests are a great example. But logging can be quite sustainable too: with some caveats, that can basically count as forest.
Oil fields are tiny, and share lands with other projects. See: west Texas, with cattle and windmills on the same land as the wells.
Parkland is often more “wild” than actual wild. Especially nature reserves.
IDK about highway statistics, but they really don’t take up a lot of physical land. Though their effect of dividing wilds is certainly understated in the graph.
IDK about mining either, but also it doesn’t seem like this would take up a ton of land. It’s really concentrated by necessity, and the worst environmental effects are usually related to pollutants or other knock-on effects.
The one fishy thing to me is grazing land. In places like Africa, there are lots of tribes and other low tech herders, and if you walk around, it really feels like their unfenced areas straddle the line between wilds and grazing lands. It’s nothing like (say) west Texas with vast fields of clearly dedicated grazing land.