The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) has published a report presenting actionable opportunities for integrated sustainable land-use and management practices. It outlines tailored policies that aim to avoid, reduce, and reverse land degradation while improving food production and farmers’ livelihoods.
The 2025 edition of FAO’s annual flagship, the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) report focuses on the theme, ‘Addressing Land Degradation Across Landholding Scales.’ According to a press release, it “provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of how human-driven land degradation impacts crop yields, identifies global vulnerability hotspots, and examines where these losses intersect with poverty, hunger and other forms of malnutrition.”
FAO defines land degradation as “a long-term decline in the land’s ability to deliver essential ecosystem functions and services,” which typically results from a combination of factors, including natural drivers, such as soil erosion and salinization, and, increasingly dominant, human-induced pressures like deforestation, overgrazing, and unsustainable cropping and irrigation practices. The report focuses on human-induced land degradation, given its profound impact on agricultural productivity.
SOFA 2025 applies “a debt-based approach, comparing current values of three key indicators – soil organic carbon, soil erosion, and soil water – against conditions that would exist without human activity under native or natural states.” It uses a machine-learning model to process these data by integrating environmental and socioeconomic drivers of change to assess the land’s baseline condition without human interference.
An estimated 1.7 billion people worldwide, including 47 million are children under five years of age, live in areas where crop yields are 10% lower due to human-induced land degradation, according to the report. Because of their accumulated degradation debt and high population densities, Asian countries are the most affected.
The report finds that reversing just 10% of human-induced degradation of existing croplands could help feed an additional 154 million people every year. This could be achieved by adopting sustainable land management (SLM) practices such as crop rotations and cover cropping to preserve soil health, reduce erosion, and foster biodiversity.
SOFA 2025 recommends integrated land-use strategies and policy interventions, including regulatory measures such as deforestation controls, incentive-based programs, and cross-compliance mechanisms linking subsidies to environmental outcomes. Going forward, it calls for:
- Aligning global and local action;
- Recognizing the diversity of land users;
- Differentiating restoration strategies;
- Strengthening land governance and scaling what works; and
- Investing in people, policies, and practices to respond to the land degradation challenge.
FAO supports efforts to achieve Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) under the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) though data, policy guidance, and on-the-ground initiatives. The data used in the report come from FAO’s Global Agro-Ecological Zoning (GAEZ v5) system, which monitors the global distribution of agroecological yield gaps, and the FAO Global Soil Organic Carbon Map (GSOC Map) of soil health data.
SOFA 2025 was released on 3 November, in advance of the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP 30) taking place in Belém, Brazil. [Publication: The State of Food and Agriculture 2025: Addressing Land Degradation Across Landholding Scales] [Publication Landing Page] [Online Report] [FAO Press Release] [UN News Story] [SDG Knowledge Hub Stories on SOFA 2024 and SOFA 2023]