Framing
California's forests, mountains, grasslands, wetlands, shrublands, and deserts support its unique biodiversity and are fundamental to human wellbeing. Land provides services which are essential to life, including oxygen, food, and water. Land is also used for housing, recreation, and transportation, and supplies biomass materials to build modern societies and form the basis for most medicines. Intact ecosystems on land act as a buffer, absorbing waste and increasing resilience. Globally, forests absorb around 30% of anthropogenic carbon emissions, dampening the impact of climate change. Over time, the amount and quality of land available to provide critical resources and services has diminished. Today, around 75% of the earth's ice-free land is directly impacted by humans, with over 40% of land classified as degraded. In California, land use, mainly agriculture, forestry, and urban development, has had a profound impact on local ecosystems. Both globally and within California, forest cover continues to decrease. The industrial form of agriculture practiced throughout much of California contributes to ecological overshoot in terms of emissions, freshwater use, and the nitrogen and phosphorus flows which lead to eutrophication and acidification.
Policy spotlight
* California's Nature-Based Solutions Climate Targets, as required by Assembly Bill 1757 (2022), seek to improve land use management. Policies aimed at: 1) reducing wildfire risk through controlled burns and removing vegetation, 2) restoring and conserving wetlands and forests, 3) greening urban areas, 4) increasing to 20% organic agriculture by 2045, 5) improving soil health, and 6) removing invasive species.
Justice lens
* Over two centuries of expropriation of Indigenous land, inherited wealth disparities, unjust lending practices, and uneven access to support services have produced severe inequities in access to land in California, as in the rest of the United States. * As of 2024, the global average ecological footprint is 2.64 global hectares per capita, while the global biocapacity is 1.48 global hectares. The Global North has historically contributed and currently contributes much more to this biocapacity deficit than the Global South. If everyone on Earth consumed like the average Californian, we would need more than 4 Earths.
Source & citation
Content on this page draws from The California Doughnut Snapshot and Report, used under CC-BY 4.0.
Aritza, A. and Kraus-Polk, J. et al. (2025). The California Doughnut Snapshot and Report. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17540639