Land Footprint of EU consumption

The European Union is a major producer and 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. As part of its commitment towards more sustainable production and consumption and the transition to a sustainable bioeconomy, the European Commission developed a physical-based model to estimate the use of land related to EU consumption, distinguishing between domestic land and virtual land embodied in trade. Building on EU land use statistics and bilateral trade statistics related to more than 500 commodities, the model performs yearly estimations of cropland, grassland, and forest land used to produce bio-based products consumed in the EU, by country of origin (De Laurentiis et al., 2024).

Estimating how much land is embodied in the EU’s consumption, and especially how much land is embodied in EU’s imports, is fundamental to understand how much pressure the EU puts on other countries by importing products that require significant amounts of land use to be produced. To this end, before being converted into their associated land use, imported commodities are associated to their country of production, taking into account the whole value chain. For example, the cropland embedded in EU imports of chocolate from Switzerland and consumed in the EU is assigned to the countries where the cocoa was originally cultivated.

The resulting estimates offer a high level of granularity, allowing the use of this model to perform scenario analyses (e.g. assessing the effect of dietary shifts). Furthermore, these estimates can serve as input data to assess other pressures and impacts linked to EU consumption, such as potential deforestation and related emissions, as well as impacts on soil and on biodiversity.

This model may serve policy makers for three main aspects that can support the analysis of both existing and future policies:

• Monitoring of policies along time
• Identification of hotspots at different levels (e.g. products responsible for larger use of land or countries from which the EU is importing more virtual land)
• Analysis of policy and green transition scenarios

Building on EU land use statistics and bilateral trade statistics related to more than 500 commodities, the Land Footprint model performs yearly estimations of cropland, grassland, and forest land used to produce bio-based products consumed in the EU, by country of origin (De Laurentiis et al., 2024).

The land footprint of EU consumption is calculated by adding together the domestic land footprint (land use taking place within EU borders) and the land footprint of net trade (land footprint of imports minus land footprint of exports). When calculating the land footprint embodied in imports, only commodities imported to be consumed in the EU are considered, thus excluding the land embodied in commodities imported to be exported (either as such or after transformation). Similarly, the land footprint embodied in EU exports is calculated considering only the exported commodities that originated from EU production, and not from imports. In this way, the land embodied in imports corresponds to a use of land taking place outside EU borders driven by EU consumption, and the land embodied in exports corresponds to a use of land taking place within EU borders.

Three different land uses are considered:

• Cropland use: harvested area necessary to grow annual and permanent crops (fallow land is excluded from this definition).
• Grassland use: the hypothetical area needed for grazing if a country's grazing land were used at maximum intensity, based on the current productivity of natural grazing lands and assuming a maximum threshold for sustainable use of grazed biomass.
• Forest land use: hypothetical area needed for timber production under the assumption of non-depleting stocks.

The commodities modelled belong to 5 groups: primary crops, plant-based products (deriving from primary crops after transformation), livestock products, fish products, timber-based products. For all groups, the first step involves re-allocating imported and exported commodities to the country where land was used to produce them. Then each commodity is converted into their embodied cropland, grassland, or forestland (or a combination of the first two), following a calculation approach tailored to the commodity group. This involves the use of yield data (in the case of primary crops), of a combination of technical coefficients (e.g. expressing production efficiencies) allowing to convert processed commodities in their primary commodity equivalent, and yield data (for plant-based products, fish products, and livestock products), or a combination of technical coefficients and forests net annual increment values, in the case of timber-based products. To account for co-production in both plant-based and livestock products (e.g. the production of soy-oil and soy-cake from the same crop), economic allocation is performed, entailing that the input primary commodity equivalent is partitioned between two or more output co-products in proportion to their economic value.

Domestic grassland and forest land are modelled in a similar way, using as a starting point statistics on production of livestock products and roundwood removals. Instead domestic cropland use is taken directly from harvested area reported for primary crops in EU land use statistics.

The Land Footprint model in based on the combination of:

• Bilateral trade data between the EU and non-EU countries
• Bilateral trade data between non-EU countries
• Production data of crops and livestock products
• Roundwood removals
• Yield data by crop and country of origin
• Net primary productivity of grassland by country of origin
• EU harvested areas for primary crops
• Net annual increment of wood in EU and non-EU countries
• Technical coefficients (e.g. production efficiencies, livestock diet composition, feed conversion ratios) taken from the scientific and technical literature.