Report: Europe’s Global Land Demand

New research commissioned by Friends of the Earth Europe from Sustainable Europe Research Institute shows the scale of flows of ‘virtual land’ around the world – this is all the land that has been used to produce traded products. The European Commission’s ‘Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe’ has recently called for Europe to measure and manage its global consumption of land.

The report calculates the global land footprint due to agriculture and forestry products for all EU countries, and for other countries including the US, Australia, India and Brazil. The findings demonstrates the value of land footprint as an indicator of resource use and provide evidence of the scale of Europe’s land consumption and its dependency on land from other parts of the world. The research shows that:

• Europe is the continent most dependent on imported land
• Nearly 60% of the land used to meet Europe’s demand for agricultural and forestry products comes from outside the continent.
• Six of the top 10 land importing countries/regions are European – Germany, UK, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Spain. Germany and the UK each import almost 80 million hectares a year.
• The EU average land consumption is 1.3 hectares per capita, while countries such as China and India use less than 0.4 hectares per capita.

It can be assumed that the EU’s demand for land has increased since 2004 – the year when the most recent data is available. It can also be assumed that it will continue to increase, especially if Europe starts to use more bio-based energy sources such as biofuels and biomass.

The report makes the following recommmendations, the EU should:

• Standardise the land footprint methodology, and generate the data needed to support it.
• Start measuring trends in Europe’s land footprint by making Member States report their land footprint annually.
• Use land footprint in EU and Member State impact assessments to enable the creation of policies that reduce land footprint, and to prevent any increase in Europe’s land footprint.
• Support EU businesses and supply chains by providing them with clear methodologies and guidance for calculating the land footprint (and material, water and carbon footprints) of their products.
• Develop new product policy aimed at reducing resource use. Importing virtual land (and other resources) has a real financial cost, and as resource prices are likely to increase in the future it makes sense for industry to understand the scale of this land use, and work to reduce it.
• Start an urgent process to set targets to reduce Europe’s land footprint. It is clear that Europe’s land footprint must come down. It should be possible to have a target in place in 2013, as suggested in the Resource Efficiency Roadmap, obliging the EU to actively pursue the right policies to reduce its land footprint. This will make the EU economy more resilient and will reduce Europe’s impacts on the rest of the world.

Download the full report from the outbound link on this page. A summary of the report’s key findings is available here, and the press release is here.