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Mapped: Human Impact on the Earth’s Surface
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Mapped: Human Impact on the Earth’s Surface
With human population on Earth now past eight billion, our impact on the planet is becoming harder to ignore with each passing year.
Our cities, infrastructure, agriculture, and pollution are all forms of stress we place on the natural world. This map, by David M. Theobald et al., shows just how much of the planet we’ve now modified. The researchers estimate that 14.6% or 18.5 million km² of land area has been modified – an area greater than Russia.
Defining Human Impact
Human impact on the Earth’s surface can take a number of different forms, and researchers took a nuanced approach to classifying the “modifications” we’ve made. In the end, 10 main stressors were used to create this map:
- Built-Up Areas: All of our cities and towns
- Agriculture: Areas devoted to crops and pastures
- Energy and extractive resources: Primarily locations where oil and gas are extracted
- Mines and quarries: Other ground-based natural resource extraction, excluding oil and gas
- Power plants: Areas where energy is produced – both renewable and non-renewable
- Transportation and service corridors: Primarily roads and railways
- Logging: This measures commodity-based forest loss (excludes factors like wildfire and urbanization)
- Human intrusion: Typically areas adjacent to population centers and roads that humans access
- Natural systems modification: Primarily modifications to water flow, including reservoir creation
- Pollution: Phenomenon such as acid rain and fog caused by air pollution
The classification descriptions above are simplified. See the methodology for full descriptions and calculations.
A Closer Look at Human Impact on the Earth’s Surface
To help better understand the level of impact humans can have on the planet, we’ll take a closer look three regions, and see how the situation on the ground relates to these maps.
Land Use Contrasts: Egypt
Almost all of Egypt’s population lives along the Nile and its delta, making it an interesting place to examine land use and human impact.
The towns and high intensity agricultural land following the river stand out clearly on the human modification map, while the nearby desert shows much less impact.
Intensive Modification: Netherlands
The Netherlands has some of the heavily modified landscapes on Earth, so the way it looks on this map will come as no surprise.
The area shown above, Rotterdam’s distinctive port and surround area, renders almost entirely in colors at the top of the human modification scale.
Resource Extraction: West Virginia
It isn’t just cities and towns that show up clearly on this map, it’s also the areas we extract our raw materials from as well. This mountainous region of West Virginia, in the United States, offers a very clear visual example.
The mountaintop removal method of mining—which involves blasting mountains in order to retrieve seams of bituminous coal—is common in this region, and mine sites show up clearly in the map.
You can explore the interactive version of this map yourself to view any area on the globe. What surprises you about these patterns of human impact?
Environment
The Most Polluted Cities in the U.S.
What are the most polluted cities in the U.S. according to data from the American Lung Association’s 2024 State of the Air Report?
The Most Polluted U.S. Cities in 2024
According to the World Health Organization, air pollution is responsible for 7 million deaths annually, and could cost the global economy between $18–25 trillion by 2060 in annual welfare costs, or roughly 4–6% of world GDP.
And with predictions that 7 in 10 people will make their homes in urban centers by mid-century, cities are fast becoming one of the frontlines in the global effort to clear the air.
In this visualization, we use 2024 data from the State of the Air report from the American Lung Association to show the most polluted cities in the United States.
What is Air Pollution?
Air pollution is a complex mixture of gases, particles, and liquid droplets and can have a variety of sources, including wildfires and cookstoves in rural areas, and road dust and diesel exhaust in cities.
There are a few kinds of air pollution that are especially bad for human health, including ozone and carbon monoxide, but here we’re concerned with fine particulate matter that is smaller than 2.5 microns, or PM2.5 for short.
The reason for the focus is because at that small size, particulate matter can penetrate the bloodstream and cause all manner of havoc, including cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, and chronic pulmonary disease.
The American Lung Association has set an annual average guideline of 9 µg/m³ for PM2.5, however, the World Health Organization has set a much more stringent limit of 5 µg/m³.
The 21 Worst Polluted Cities in the U.S.
Here are the top 21 most polluted cities in the U.S., according to their annual average PM2.5 concentrations:
| Rank | City, State | Annual average concentration, 2020-2022 (µg/m3) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bakersfield, CA | 18.8 |
| 2 | Visalia, CA | 18.4 |
| 3 | Fresno, CA | 17.5 |
| 4 | Eugene, OR | 14.7 |
| 5 | Bay Area, CA | 14.3 |
| 6 | Los Angeles, CA | 14.0 |
| 7 | Sacramento, CA | 13.8 |
| 8 | Medford, OR | 13.5 |
| 9 | Phoenix, AZ | 12.4 |
| 10 | Fairbanks, AK | 12.2 |
| 11 | Indianapolis, IN | 11.9 |
| 12 | Yakima, WA | 11.8 |
| 13 | Detroit, MI | 11.7 |
| T14 | Chico, CA | 11.6 |
| T14 | Spokane, WA | 11.6 |
| 15 | Houston, TX | 11.4 |
| 16 | El Centro, CA | 11.1 |
| 17 | Reno, NV | 11.0 |
| 18 | Pittsburgh, PA | 10.9 |
| T19 | Kansas City, KS | 10.8 |
| T19 | Las Vegas, NV | 10.8 |
Note: The American Lung Association uses Core Based Statistical Areas in its city and county rankings, which have been shortened here to the area’s principal city, or metro area in the case of the Bay Area, CA.
Six of the top seven cities are in California, and four in the state’s Central Valley, a 450-mile flat valley that runs parallel to the Pacific coast, and bordered by the Coast and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. As a result, when pollution from the big population centers on the coast is carried inland by the wind—cities #5 and #6 on the list—it tends to get trapped in the valley.
Bakersfield (#1), Visalia (#2), and Fresno (#3) are located at the drier and hotter southern end of the valley, which is worse for air quality. The top three local sources of PM2.5 emissions in 2023 were farms (20%), forest management / agricultural waste burning (20%), and road dust (14%).
Benefit to Economy
While the health impacts are generally well understood, less well known are the economic impacts.
Low air quality negatively affects worker productivity, increases absenteeism, and adds both direct and indirect health care costs. But the flip side of that equation is that improving air quality has measurable impacts to the wider economy. The EPA published a study that calculated the economic benefits of each metric ton of particulate matter that didn’t end up in the atmosphere, broken down by sector.
| Sector | Benefits per metric ton |
|---|---|
| Residential Woodstoves | $429,220 |
| Refineries | $333,938 |
| Industrial Boilers | $174,229 |
| Oil and Natural Gas Transmission | $125,227 |
| Electricity Generating Units | $124,319 |
| Oil and Natural Gas | $88,838 |
At the same time, the EPA recently updated a cost-benefit analysis of the Clean Air Act, the main piece of federal legislation governing air quality, and found that between 1990 and 2020 it cost the economy roughly $65 billion, but also provided $2 trillion in benefits.
Benefit to Business
But that’s at the macroeconomic level, so what about for individual businesses?
For one, employees like to breathe clean air and will choose to work somewhere else, given a choice. A 2022 Deloitte case study revealed that nearly 70% of highly-skilled workers said air quality was a significant factor in choosing which city to live and work in.
At the same time, air quality can impact employer-sponsored health care premiums, by reducing the overall health of the risk pool. And since insurance premiums averaged $7,590 per year in 2022 for a single employee, and rose to $21,931 for a family, that can add up fast.
Consumers are also putting their purchase decisions through a green lens, while ESG, triple-bottom-line, and impact investing are putting the environment front and center for many investors.
And if the carrot isn’t enough for some businesses, there is the stick. The EPA recently gave vehicle engine manufacturer Cummins nearly two billion reasons to help improve air quality, in a settlement the agency is calling “the largest civil penalty in the history of the Clean Air Act and the second largest environmental penalty ever.”
Learn how the National Public Utilities Council is working toward the future of sustainable electricity.
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