Publications Office of the EU
Modelling the land footprint of EU consumption
DisplayCustomHeader
MyPortal
slovenčina
BasketSummary
Zobrazenie webového obsahu
Publication Detail Actions Portlet

Pomôcky

Publication Detail Actions Portlet
 Používateľské hodnotenie
custom-survey-notification
Publication Detail Portlet

Publication detail

Home

Modelling the land footprint of EU consumption

Metaúdaje publikácie

The European Union is a major trading partner of bio-based products and commodities worldwide. It is therefore crucial to estimate the consequences of EU consumption in terms of the related land demand both domestically and outside the EU. Land footprinting methods, inherently adopt life cycle thinking. They allow estimate land embedded in commodities and goods consumed by a country or region, distinguishing between domestic land and virtual land embedded in trade. This project aims to build a transparent and straightforward model that performs the yearly estimation of the EU’s land footprint, using official data sources as a starting point. This report presents the development of a land footprinting model (hereafter the LAFO 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 a chosen reference period, comparing them with the results of similar studies. Detailed results of the LAFO model are presented for the EU27 relatively to the year 2018, showing that the EU was a net importer of cropland (net imports of 21 Mha), grassland (net imports of 1 Mha) and forest land (net imports of 20 Mha*y) embedded in bio-based products. The temporal evolution of the EU land footprint between 2014 and 2019 confirmed these results throughout this timeframe. An analysis of the countries on which the EU was mostly relying for imports of virtual cropland, grassland and forest land in 2018 highlights that the overseas EU land footprint was concentrated in relatively few countries, varying according to the type of products and commodities (e.g. oilcake from Brazil, oilseed crops and paper from the US, wood and paper from the Russian Federation, cereal crops from Ukraine, cotton from Bangladesh, vegetable oils from Ukraine and Indonesia, livestock products from Brazil and the UK). When comparing the results yielded by the LAFO model with the existing literature, the estimations of the EU per capita cropland footprint and forest land footprint are aligned with other studies adopting a physical-based accounting approach. Less alignment can be found in the case of the EU grassland footprint (both between this study and the existing literature and in general across different studies), confirming that the grassland footprint estimation is affected by higher uncertainty on input data, compared to cropland and forest land footprints
Zobraziť viac
Zobraziť menej
ISSN 1831-9424
ISBN 978-92-76-46705-2
DOI 10.2760/97417
Katalógové číslo KJ-NA-30966-EN-N
ISSN 1018-5593
ISBN 978-92-76-46706-9
DOI 10.2760/667734
Katalógové číslo KJ-NA-30966-EN-C
PDF
ISSN 1831-9424 ISBN 978-92-76-46705-2 DOI 10.2760/97417 Katalógové číslo KJ-NA-30966-EN-N
Papier
ISSN 1018-5593 ISBN 978-92-76-46706-9 DOI 10.2760/667734 Katalógové číslo KJ-NA-30966-EN-C
  • Released on EU publications website:
Túto publikáciu je možné stiahnuť vo webovom formáte (PDF) a vo formáte optimalizovanom pre tlač vo vysokej kvalite (PDF/X). Viac informácií o tom, ako vytlačiť vlastnú kópiu publikácií EÚ, nájdete v našejsekcii Najčastejšie otázky.
Publication Viewer

Prehliadač dokumentov

Pop up window annotations