My country Haiti has about 36.5% designated as arable (suitable for crops) and roughly 65% as agricultural land,alot of this is steep, marginal land cultivated due to population pressure, leading to a lot less f things to erosion and deforestation, with only a small fraction (around 3.5-12%) being forest, Haiti's land is primarily mountainous, with over 63% having slopes greater than 20%, making much of it unsuitable for sustainable farming. Farmers often cultivate marginal land (steep slopes), with areas sometimes exceeding truly arable land, indicating intense pressure and stress to the environment . Some things people in their communities are doing like planting trees in around certain places and cities, theres organizations like Haiti national trust organizations whose goal is to protect to the land while operating in safe land projects focused on sustainable housing, disaster resilience and land restorations
Sources: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Haiti/arable\_land\_percent/ & https://www.srdhaiti.org/en/reforestation
I don't know about exact numbers but we do have way more land available, we have very big valleys and plains with a lot of space, why the Santo Domingo urban area has grown so much in the last decades (rather inefficiently I must add, precisely because of how much land is available).
We could see the development of two Megalopolis in some years, one going from San Cristóbal to San Pedro de Macorís centered around Santo Domingo, and one centered around Santiago including the cities of La Vega, Moca and even San Francisco. That last one does worries me a bit since that's some of the most fertile land of the country and could affect our food security
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Yea I notice alot of people live near the capital or Santiago. I was in DR a couple years ago to visit a friend and i think San Pedro would be a viable for candidate megapolis its big enough and plenty of open land/space from Santo Domingo to San Pedro
Yeah, Santo Domingo urban growth is basically encroaching on the beach town of Boca Chica which sits almost at the border between Santo Domingo province and San Pedro Province, it's likely to keep going east
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60% of Belize is under protection. We only have about 420,000 people in just under 23,000 sq km (8,867 sq miles).
Belize is a biodiversity hotspot on land and sea. It also has impressive Mayan architecture and archeological sites, so protection is important.
60% that’s incredible, how has the growing wild life affected the area?
It used to be 80%!
Holy furball. are the hotspots a result of this?
Belize has the world's 1st jaguar reserve, the world's 2nd largest barrier reef, 3 of the western hemisphere's 4 atolls, etc...
Thats very assuring when government prioritizes land for citizens and wildlife properly.
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Not uninhabitable, but not allowed by law is about 30% of the island I think. Basically all the dark and light green on the map and yellow is allowed but with limitations. Most of that 30% is a national park or areas under the park's protection.
M because of wildlife?
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When it comes to land The Bahamas is a paradox. Generally, the majority of the country is quite empty, however when it comes to our capital (Nassau) there is symptoms of over-population and gross urban sprawl. Considering that 70-75% of the country lives here.
The second part of the paradox is despite there being a decent amount of land. A decent part of it isn't suitable for habitation because of sea level rise and lack of elevation. It would be unsustainable considering storm surge from hurricanes. It isn't Maldives level bad, but concerning none the less, as our highest elevation is 63m. (Land in green) (orange & purple is protected land)
Still our issue isn't lack of choice up here, but mainly cost of development and maintenance. For every island to support a population, you need a power station, water plant, telecommunications, airport/seaport, school, clinic, police, fire service/volunteers. You can't drive to the next parish/county, you have to take a plane, mailboat, Air-ambulance, etc. So this is very expensive.
Most of the population is urban and agriculture although, seeing a slight boost, is irrelevant (0.8% arable land)
very interesting I’ve never thought about that. And how much Bahamas land is being agriculturally used and What is being done to combat these concerns you mentioned?
Most of our agricultural land is either on Andros or Eleuthera. In the past we had decent produce but American tariffs destroyed our industry. We never had the domestic market to sustain it. So very little.
Most of our success nowadays is in hydroponics and smaller startups.
The overall government is very unbothered/lax in responding to the environmental concerns. They are finally looking at better flood planing and creating flood maps but aren’t really invested ensuring housing is banned from being built in vulnerable areas.
In regard to the overcrowding on Nassau, they’ve zoned more multi-family houses but at the same time they still allow large manored gated communities to pop-up.
The issues regarding cost are not really easy to solve.
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Basically everything in orange is uninhabitable due to volcanic risk
How much of the ppl live in the green area?
The entire population which is ~4500
Hmm are they open to immigration? I live in Curacao and its getting overcrowded for me (160,000 on 444 km2)
If you can handle the boredom of living in a small community
At my age i wouldn’t mind at all
All of it is "inhabitable", but filling up everything up severely limits livability. How much uninhabited space is necessary to ensure livability ranges, but some calculations indicate 50m2 per capita, which I dont agree with, cause 3 of our dutch islands are already in the top most densely populated and I feel overcrowded already.
All of it is inhabitable... But would we inhabit it? No because we love our rainforest and fresh air,it would be dumb bc animals would lose homes and our country would look bad
This question really had me thinking since it's something I'd never really considered, especially since you specified arable land. I pulled these stats below from Google. Now, what I want to say is that apart from these stats I pulled, much like Haiti, we suffer quite a bit from soil erosion, but unlike you all, I couldn't find any solid initiatives that deal with it. We have quite a bit of areas that can't be planted on due to wetlands, being low lying, forestry, and urban development. It's a big problem.
Trinidad and Tobago has a total land area of about 5,128 km², but only a limited portion is easily livable or productive. Roughly 44% of the land is forested, 10–11% is agricultural, and only about 4.9% is arable land suitable for crop production. The remaining ~45% consists of urban areas, hills, wetlands, roads, and undeveloped terrain. This means that less than half of the country’s land is realistically suitable for long-term settlement and infrastructure, and only a very small fraction supports food production.
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There aren't exact numbers for Suriname. But what I know is that 1.5 million hectares of land has agricultural potential. Which is about 9% of Suriname's land. Of that, only 120.000 ha is used. Which is about 0.8% of the total land in Suriname or 8% of the 1.5 million.
We still have lots of space available for farming and living, as we are a big country with only 600k people. 93% of Suriname is jungle. And because of that it is also a high forest, low deforestation country. However, illegal gold mining does threaten that a little bit.
The government isn't doing a lot about it so yeah. They have their hands deep in that.
EDIT: Though the current government had pledged to protect 80% or more of the jungle. They were busy with a law but it didn't pass through Parliament because of a lot of holes, the status of the rights of the indigenous and maroons isn't defined yet and unclear roles between some authorities. It has some truth, but I think some people Parliament don't want that law come into affect.
I read that only less than 1%of Suriname’s land is used for agriculture idk how factual that is. it seems like Suriname geography acts as a crowd control
Haha. I can understand why it seems that way, but Suriname just always had a very small population which gradually grew. And then we also lost a little more than 1/3 of our population to the Netherlands and other parts of the world, like Curaçao, Aruba, Sint Maarten, French Guiana, France, Belgium and the US and currently also Serbia and Greece.
To some extent the geography might play a role, but not a major one.
Also the way the Dutch developed the country from times of slavery up to the previous century also plays a role in the spaces where we live.
The area that most of us live in - including the agricultural zones - is actually not a difficult geographic area. Most of us don't live in the Amazon jungle. We live in the coastal zone, which is where you find coastal jungle and savannah jungle.
The coastal zone is actually flat and a little bit above sea level. Some parts are also below sea level and protected by a dyke or dam.
That is the 120.000 ha I was talking about. It's not exactly one percent it's just 0.8%.