Model development and results
Sustainably managing land systems is an essential component of the path towards sustainable development: land use is the main driver of biodiversity loss and 23% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions between 2007 and 2016 were generated by the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use sectors (AFOLU). The European Union is the major exporter and importer of agricultural products worldwide. It is therefore crucial to estimate the consequences of EU consumption in terms of the related land demand both domestically and outside EU territories.
Land footprinting methods, inherently adopting life cycle thinking, allow estimating land embedded in commodities and goods consumed by a country or region, distinguishing between domestically used land and virtual land imported and exported through trade.
This project aims at building a transparent and straightforward model that performs the yearly estimation of EU’s land footprint, using as a starting point official data sources. This report presents the development of a land footprinting model, by illustrating its conceptual design and methodological assumptions, the calculations performed, the underlying data sources used, and the results yielded by the model for the years 2014 to 2019, comparing the results obtained for 2018 with the results of similar studies.
DE LAURENTIIS Valeria;
GALLI Arianna;
SALA Serenella;
2022-01-27
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC128072
978-92-76-46705-2 (online),
978-92-76-46706-9 (print),
1831-9424 (online),
1018-5593 (print),
EUR 30966 EN,
OP KJ-NA-30966-EN-N (online),
OP KJ-NA-30966-EN-C (print),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC128072,
10.2760/97417 (online),
10.2760/667734 (print),
