The Global Agro-Ecological Zoning version 4 (GAEZ v4), launched on 17 June 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, crop modelling, 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 biophysical determinants for agricultural management decisions including physical drivers of climate change is necessary.

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

To refine the overall GAEZ assessment, there was an initial consultation on the data used for GAEZ v5 in December 2021. Additional recommendations for updates, refinements and extensions of approaches and modules are listed in the Appendix 1-1 (“Recommendations for further GAEZ development”) of the GAEZ v4 Model Documentation.

Cite this content as:

FAO. 2022. Modernizing Global Agro-Ecological Zoning with new methods: Report of proceedings. Rome.