The pie chart illustrates the main causes of land degradation around the world.The bar chart provieds detailed information about the way these causes influenced
Europe,Oceania and North America in the 1990s.
Overall, it is evident that over-grazing was the primary cause of soil degradation worldwide, closely followed by deforestation and over-cultivation, and predominated over salinization. Europe experienced the highest level of land damage among the three regions, whereas North America was the least affected.
According to the pie chart, over-grazing held the lion’s share of total land degradation at 34%. Deforestation and over-cultivation were also major causes, contributed almost equal shares at 30% and 28% respectively . In contrast, salinization was the least significant factor, responsible for only 8.0% of worldwide degraded land.
Turning to the regional data,Europe was the most affected region with high levels of deforestation and over-cultivation at 8.4% and 7.7% ,which together contributed to its large amount of damaged land. In Oceania, land degradation was overwhelmingly dominated by over-grazing, which affected 10.8% of the agricultural land, whereas deforestation and over-cultivation had minus impacts at 1.8% and 1.0% respectively. Conversely, North America showed the lowest figures across the board, where cultivation was the main factor at 3.3%, followed by deforestation at 3.0% which doubled the figure for over-grazing at 1.5%.