Taken from this post, which has the National Food Strategy report as the source. See figure 9.3 on page 90.
About 70% is devoted to agriculture, mainly livestock and livestock feed and pasture.
The right-hand side of the chart, using the same scale, shows how much land is used overseas to produce food for the UK. About half of the total land use takes place overseas.
The combined land area for rearing beef and lamb for UK consumption is larger than the UK itself.
Mmmh. This is a simplification that is borderline disingenuous.
What falls under “beef and lamb pasture” is in large parts moorlands and heathen, which are typically shared surfaces. There is no doubt that sheep have largely shaped the faces of UK national parks (the use of the name ‘national park’ in that case is a very British specificity), but they are still a relatively rich environment with higher biodiversity. They provide several sub-biotopes, specifically wetlands (not sure where the border with peat lies), which can be particularly diverse and rich.
While in some places, sheep can occupy that land 80% of the time, in other places they can be mostly absent. They still have a high impact even if they only graze once a year, but it’s a very wide continuum.
So they’re not exactly the same as intensive agricultural land (single-use and extremely poor in biodiversity) and I’m not sure why they are described here as a sort of single-use land.
Is this the new Catan expansion pack?