How Much Land Do You Use: 8 Ways to Sustainably Reduce Your Land Use Footprint

Your presence on this earth and the need to house you has an impact on the natural world…

Throughout history, as human populations have grown, settlements and cities have sprouted up and expanded to accommodate people and their housing needs—and this, of course, continues into the present day.

Trees get cut down to clear land for development, fertile soil is paved over for roads, and natural waterways are rerouted into pipes or reconstructed to fit around our growing concrete jungles.

All of these actions take away habitat for a host of native plants, animals, and fungi (and even beneficial soil microbes!) in order to provide living space for us humans, along with a handful of largely non-native plant and animal species that we choose to bring with us (e.g. cats, dogs) or the few that naturally thrive alongside us (e.g. rats, raccoons, pigeons, etc.) in these new urban landscapes.

The result is a loss of biodiversity, a decrease in ecosystem productivity, and damage to a host of natural systems that provide valuable environmental services, like air purification, local temperature regulation, and water filtration—among other things.

Now, if that didn’t seem bad enough, the space us humans directly take up with our housing is only a piece of the puzzle. Read on to discover how your footprint on the planet could be a lot larger than you thought.

What is a Land Use Footprint?

According to a 2020 study by researchers from Princeton University, the demands of your typical day-to-day needs result in not just direct land use impacts, like the land you require to house yourself, but many indirect ones as well.

In their research paper, titled Locational Choices and Consumer Behaviors on Personal Land Footprints: An Exploration Across the Urban–Rural Continuum in the United States, the researchers developed a tool for examining what they called “consumption-based land footprints” and used it to compare urban and rural residents.

In some ways this is similar to the concept of measuring “ecological footprints," which look at how fast we consume resources (like water) or generate waste (like GHG emissions) and how fast nature can bounce back from these burdens we place on it.

But the footprint the Princeton researchers are looking at here is something a bit more literal in that they actually looked at how much land you’re using in terms of square footage—both directly and indirectly.

The direct land use they looked at was housing and the indirect land uses were ones relating to consumption of goods and services, like purchasing clothing and driving a car—as well as all the spatial requirements that your individual share of that requires, from the space needed for a factory to manufacture what you buy to the space needed to drive and park your car around town.

And what did they find, you might ask?

The researchers found each of our imprints on the land are much higher than most people realize, largely because of our indirect land-uses—many of which are things you don’t necessarily see or think about day-to-day.

Rural versus Urban Land Use

Direct Land Use

First, with direct land use, they found that your footprint depends on the size and type of your housing—for example, if you live in a single-family home on a large lot on the edge of a city, your footprint is larger than if you live in a one-bedroom apartment downtown.

This is really pretty obvious, in that someone living in a 500 sq. ft. apartment with no yard downtown obviously takes up less direct physical space than someone living in a 2000 sq. ft. house on a 5000 sq. ft. lot in the suburbs (or on an acreage in the country).

And so, not so surprisingly, the researchers found that rural residents’ direct land use is typically 10 times larger than for urban residents.

Indirect Land Use

Looking at indirect land use more closely, they found that a typical urban resident’s indirect land use was about 23 times larger than their direct land use. And on top of that they found rural residents indirect land use is about 6% higher than urban residents.

Again, your indirect land use comes down to things like land required to grow the food you eat, manufacture your clothes (and everything else you buy), and the land taken up by the services you use, like the footprint of shops you frequent and the parking lot at your grocery store.

And the 6% difference between urban and rural indirect land use? They attributed this to urban areas having a greater availability of goods and services—so essentially urban residents have more of their daily needs within walking distance of where they live, which means they drive less and so less space is used for their cars when compared to rural residents.

Actions to Reduce Indirect Land Use

So what might this all mean for you?

Well, the Princeton researchers identified five individual actions relating to consumption that could reduce your indirect land footprint.

The five consumer behavior changes they identified were:

1. Reducing paper product consumption, which can reduce the average person’s land use footprint by 0.7%.

2. Reducing automobile ownership and driving, which could reduce one’s land use footprint by 1.3%—this could be going from a two-car household to a one-car household, taking public transit more often, or, in this post-COVID era, it could mean working from home a few days a week.

3. Reducing clothing consumption by spending about 80% less on clothes, such as through using the clothes you already have longer—this provides a land use reduction of 2.8%.

4. Having meatless Mondays, or in other words having one meatless/vegetarian day a week, which would reduce your land use footprint by 3.3% (this seems to suggest that you’d reduce your footprint by 23.1% if you went fully vegetarian).

5. Halving avoidable food waste, which can reduce the average person’s land-use footprint by 4.7%.

Actions to Reduce Direct Land Use

The researchers also identified three housing choice actions—or what they called “relocation” choices—relating to reducing one’s direct land-use footprint.

These were:

1. Moving from a single-family dwelling into a multi-family dwelling, like a townhouse or apartment, which reduces land-use footprint on average by 1.9%.

2. Moving closer towards the nearest urban center, such as from a rural area to an urban area)—this had the greatest impact of all the actions they presented at a whopping 10.6% reduction in land-use footprint.

3. Relocating from a medium-density metropolitan area to a more densely populated metro, which in their example was moving from Minneapolis-Saint Paul to New York City—this had the second greatest impact on land-use footprint reduction at 7.6%.

Final Takeaways

Overall, the researchers’ two final takeaways were:

1. that urban planners, the development industry, and our elected officials must work together to continue developing more compact cities and neighborhoods that reduce direct land use; and

2. that you—the consumer—can have just as much of an impact with your behavior by being more aware and making smarter choices about what and how much you consume (as well as where you choose to live when the opportunity presents itself).

So, if you’ve ever been curious about trying that tasty-looking tofu recipe you saw that one time on TikTok, maybe tonight’s the night to give it a try… ?

Let Us Know

Let us know in the comments below if you feel inspired to make any changes in your life. And, if you enjoyed this article, please let us know by hitting “like” and subscribe. Thanks for reading!