# Calculating proportion of area covered by another layer - not just the intersection

This is a follow up question from $area gives NULL for some polygons in QGIS's Field Calculator and$area is NULL for over-wrapping geometry.

I have a map of Cambodia at district level (dist) and economic land concession (elc). I am trying to calculate the proportion of district that is occupied by the economic land concession. I have tried the following:

1. created area for elc layer
2. for dist layer, 100*intersecting_geom_sum('elc','area_elc')/$area Problem is, there are some districts that have over 100% coverage because the elc layers in these districts have outrageously large area calculated. I have used the following data, projected them into EPSG:3148, set the output field length as 21 for area calculation as advised. I also ran fix geometry for elc layer afterwards. How can I correctly calculate the area for these districts. *** ADDED I have found that for a small district, area of one big chunk of elc that cross the district and other district was used- instead of part of elc that is within district. Attached as picture below: When I take the intersection, it works to cut them correctly. How could I possibly correct this problem? Data using: GEO2_KH (Cambodia shapefile) https://international.ipums.org/international/gis_harmonized_2nd.shtml ELCs: All economic land concessions shapefile https://data.opendevelopmentcambodia.net/dataset/economiclandconcessions • @UdithaHerath, Could you please have a look at this at your convenience? I'd appreciate any advice on this. Thank you! – JessicaP Jan 26 at 14:59 • Why do you keep the area as square meters and not convert it in square kilometers ? I think it's more meaning full when you work with country, district data. You can create a float number field. – J. Monticolo Jan 26 at 15:05 • Try area($geometry) for the calculations. – Erik Jan 26 at 15:13
• check that fix geometry actually produced valid geometries – Ian Turton Jan 26 at 17:06
• just because it looks ok doesn't mean it is valid - check with isValid() – Ian Turton Jan 28 at 11:29

I tried to calculate that proportion and It worked for me. May be you did something wrong with those areas. The issue here is that a single dist can have several elc intersections.

Here is the result:

Here I describe you the process:

1. Correct geometries (otherwise the intersection tool doesn't work).
2. Intersection (Union) of the layers. This layer will serve as a future dissolved layer with the elc area within each dist.
3. Filter the layer removing those polygons with null fid(keep just elc).
4. Dissolve by ADMIN_NAME. This will make a single elc área.
5. Calculate the área of elc.
6. Join layers: dist joined to the dissolved layer by ADMIN_NAME.
7. Calculate the percentage of dist covered with elc.

Here some screenshots:

• Thank you so much for your answer! – JessicaP Feb 5 at 15:02