Australian land use

Did you know that the area of the Australian land mass is 769 million hectares (ha)?

Australian land is managed by:

• Approximately 134,000 agricultural businesses, who manage around 52% of the total land area
• Australian, state and territory governments, which manage national parks, state forests and other public land totalling around 25% of the total land area
• Indigenous Australians, who have formal ownership and management or co-management responsibility for 23% of the total land area

Some recent trends in land use include:

Agriculture

• In 2001 the area of agricultural land use was about 452 million ha. By 2010 this had reduced to 398 million ha or 52% of the total area of Australia. 
• Grazing of natural vegetation through the period of 1996-2006 reduced from 431 million ha to about 355 million ha.
• The number of farm businesses declined from 140,516 in 2001 to 134,184 in 2010.

Conservation

• Areas managed for conservation have expanded over the last decade by about 50% to about 25 percent of Australia’s land use area.
• Areas formally owned and managed by Indigenous Australian’s increased to around 23 percent of Australia’s land use area.

Forestry

• Public native forest managed for wood production declined by nearly 20 percent or around 9 million hectares.
• Plantation forests expanded to around one million hectares.

Intensive uses

• Urban and rural residential land use continue to sprawl.

More detailed information is available through the resources below.

Resources

ABARES, Australian Land Use Management (ALUM) Classification. ABARES (2012) [details]

ABS, Land management and farming in Australia 2007-08. ABS (2009) [details]

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australian Farming in Brief, 2011 . Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2012) [details]

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Natural Resource Management on Australian Farms, 2006-07. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2008) [details]

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Year Book Australia, 2009–10. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2010) [details]

Australian State of the Environment Committee, Land use trends in the Australian State of the Environment Report 2011. Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (2012) [details]