A rapidly growing share of global agricultural areas is devoted to the production of biomass for non-food purposes. The expanding non-food bioeconomy can have far-reaching social and ecological implications; yet, the non-food sector has attained little attention in land footprint studies. This paper provides the first assessment of the global cropland footprint of non-food products of the European Union (EU), a globally important region regarding its expanding bio-based economy. We apply a novel hybrid land flow accounting model, combining the biophysical trade model LANDFLOW with the multi-regional input-output model EXIOBASE. The developed hybrid approach improves the level of product and country detail, while comprehensively covering all global supply chains from agricultural production to final consumption, including highly-processed products, such as many non-food products. The results highlight the EU's role as a major processing and the biggest consuming region of cropland-based non-food products while at the same time relying heavily on imports. Two thirds of the cropland required to satisfy the EU's non-food biomass consumption are located in other world regions, particularly in China, the US and Indonesia, giving rise to potential impacts on distant ecosystems. With almost 39% in 2010, oilseeds used to produce for example biofuels, detergents and polymers represented the dominant share of the EU's non-food cropland demand. Traditional non-food biomass uses, such as fibre crops for textiles and animal hides and skins for leather products, also contributed notably (22%). Our findings suggest that if the EU Bioeconomy Strategy is to support global sustainable development, a detailed monitoring of land use displacement and spillover effects is decisive for targeted and effective EU policy making.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6736 |
| Date | 18 February 2019 |
| Creators | Bruckner, Martin, Häyhä, Tiina, Giljum, Stefan, Maus, Victor, Fischer, Günther, Tramberend, Sylvia, Boerner, Jan |
| Publisher | IOP Publishing |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Germany (CC BY 3.0 DE) |
| Relation | https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab07f5, https://ioppublishing.org/, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1405-7951, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab07f5, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6736/ |
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