Mapping Biophysical Factors that Influence Agricultural Production and Rural Vulnerability

This monograph is part of a series of reports that explain how techniques of spatial analysis can be used to investigate poverty and environment links worldwide. It combines rural population distribution data contained in the global rural population database for the year 2000 (FAO, 2005) with methods and results of the "Global agro-ecological assessment for agriculture in the 21st Century" (Fischer et al., 2002), in order to estimate the distribution of the worlds rural population by agricultural suitability class, land use category and type of farming system. Refinements in GIS databases and analysis techniques have been developed collaboratively by FAO and IIASA in the project "Improving Methods for Poverty and Food Insecurity Mapping and its Use at Country Leve"l, which was jointly implemented by FAO, UNEP/GRID-Arendal and CGIAR centers and funded by the Government of Norway. The report considers the constraints imposed by environmental conditions at different levels of human input, evaluates agricultural production potential of the worlds land area at a resolution of 5 arc-minutes (about 85 square kilometre at the equator), and reports on rural habitation in relation to agricultural production potential, land use patterns and farming systems. Other related reports are: "A geospatial framework for the analysis of poverty and and environment links", "Mapping global urban and rural population distributions and Food Insecurity"," Poverty and Environment Global GIS Database (FGGD)" and "Digital Atlas for the Year 2000".