The Global Agro-Ecological Zoning version 4 (GAEZ v4), launched on June 17th 2021, uses well-established land evaluation principles to assess natural resources for finding suitable agricultural land utilization options. It is based on agro-climatic assessments, models, natural and human resources, crop statistics and water use at global scale. With the increasing complexity and intensity of environmental and social challenges an improved understanding of the physical drivers of climate change is necessary. Consequently, a systematic and harmonized update of the global datasets is intended for the further development of GAEZ.

The main strategic goal of new version of GAEZ (version 5) is to make the outputs of the system available to national entities to support wise land use decision-making. To this end, supported by the GAEZ Partnership, GAEZ v5 will provide dynamically updated AEZ information, to meet local to global level AEZ users’ need.

To refine the overall GAEZ assessment, additional layers will be included in the land resources and climate database. Appendix 1 “Recommendations for further GAEZ development”) of the GAEZ v4 Model Documentation1 provides a list of potential database updates and improvements including for climate (both base-line and climate projections), land cover/land use, soil (with improved detail of processes such as land degradation) and ancillary datasets used for reporting and planning (e.g. areas reserved for environmental protection and maintenance of biodiversity, population density, livestock, administrative boundaries)

GAEZ makes use of best available global spatial databases to estimate the biophysical crop production potential for over 100 crops and crop sub-types. The estimation procedures consecutively consider factors relevant for crop production over time and for different management conditions. An overview of the overall GAEZ v4 model structure and data integration is shown in Figure 1 and detailed information about the process and methodology are provided in the Model Documentation.