How Far Does the European Union Reach? Analyzing Embodied HANPP

Helmut Haberl, Thomas Kastner, Anke Schaffartzik, Karl-Heinz Erb

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesChapterpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

International trade plays an increasingly important role in supplying societies with biophysical resources and products. In terms of land-based products, trade plays an ever-greater role in meeting the resource demand of densely populated industrialized regions such as Europe—not only with relatively small volumes of luxury products such as coffee, cocoa and tropical fruits but increasingly also with large volumes of resources such as staple crops and protein feed. Meanwhile, the land resources required to produce the products consumed in Europe are global, raising issues about consumer responsibility and the accounting and regulation of environmental impacts. This chapter discusses how global land demand related to Europe’s consumption can be traced using the ‘human appropriation of net primary production’ approach (eHANPP). This approach aims to quantify and map the total HANPP ensuing in the supply chains of the products consumed in Europe. We discuss how eHANPP can be estimated using bilateral trade matrices of biomass-based products and how this approach can help us better understand trade-related global ‘teleconnections’ in the land system. We show that the EU27 increasingly depends on lands outside its territory, and we discuss the implications in terms of the European Union’s land-related policies .
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication Social Ecology
Subtitle of host publicationSociety-Nature Relations across Time and Space
EditorsHelmut Haberl, Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Fridolin Krausmann, Verena Winiwarter
Pages349–360
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016

Publication series

NameHuman-Environment Interactions
Number5

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