Historical Vetting|Land Cover

Why this criterion? This scenario reports land cover that is inconsistent with historical values. This is a concern because the underlying modelling likely makes false assumptions on land cover today and the efforts needed to reduce emissions while feeding the planet.

Why this threshold? Historical values for land cover are provided by Hurtt (2020), Chini (2025), Chini (2026), and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2026).

The thresholds are derived from these sources as follows:
• 2010, 2015, and 2020: ±10% deviation for land cover and ±20% for crop-land cover.
• 2025: ±20% deviation for land cover and ±30% for crop-land cover.

Note that these ranges not only give models some leeway to deviate, but also account for uncertainty in the underlying data sources. To further account for uncertainty in the historical values, the most permissible source of all sources for each variable, region, and period is used to set the threshold.

The threshold for 2025 is set to the value reported for 2020.

WorldGeneric regionsModel-native regions

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R5R9R10

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AIM 3.0C3IAM 3.0CGEM-ESM 1.0COFFEE 1.6GCAM 9.1GEM-E3 V2026IMACLIM 2.0IMAGE 3.4MEESA v1.4MESSAGEix-GLOBIOM 2.1-R12MINES 0.1.0OPEN-PROM 2.2POLES 2.4REMIND-MAgPIE 3.7-4.14WITCH 6.0

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Reference data

Dataset	Source	Description
`FAOSTAT-2026`	Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2026)	Based on Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2026).
`FAOSTAT-2026-extrapol25`	Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2026)	Data from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2026) extrapolated to 2025.
`LUH2-2020`	Hurtt (2020)	Based on Hurtt (2020).
`LUH2-GCB-2025`	Chini (2025)	Based on Chini (2025).
`LUH2-GCB-2025-extrapol25`	Chini (2025)	Data from Chini (2025) extrapolated to 2025.

Sources

Identifier	Bibliographic information	Links
`FAOSTAT-2026`	Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAOSTAT. Databases: Land Use, Land Cover, Emissions totals, Emissions from Forests, Emissions from Crops, Emissions from Livestock, Emissions from Fires, Emissions from Drained organic solids. 2026. FAOSTAT Database Recommended citation style per FAO: "FAO. [Year of last update]. [Name of database: Name of dataset]. [Accessed on DD Month YYYY]. [URL]. Licence: CC-BY-4.0.".	URL
`LUH2-2020`	G. C. Hurtt, L. Chini, R. Sahajpal, S. Frolking, B. L. Bodirsky, K. Calvin, J. C. Doelman, J. Fisk, S. Fujimori, K. Klein Goldewijk, T. Hasegawa, P. Havlik, A. Heinimann, F. Humpenöder, J. Jungclaus, J. O. Kaplan, J. Kennedy, T. Krisztin, D. Lawrence, P. Lawrence, L. Ma, O. Mertz, J. Pongratz, A. Popp, B. Poulter, K. Riahi, E. Shevliakova, E. Stehfest, P. Thornton, F. N. Tubiello, D. P. van Vuuren, and X. Zhang. Harmonization of global land use change and management for the period 850–2100 (LUH2) for CMIP6. Geosci. Model Dev., 13(11):5425–5464, 2020.	DOI PDF
`LUH2-GCB-2025`	Louise Chini and George Hurtt. Land-Use Harmonization 2 for Global Carbon Budget 2025 (LUH2-GCB2025). 2025.	DOI
`LUH3-2026`	Louise Chini and George Hurtt. Land-Use Harmonization 3 v1.2 for CMIP7 Historical (LUH3 v1.2) . March 2026.	DOI