TY - JOUR
T1 - Trading land
T2 - A review of approaches to accounting for upstream land requirements of traded products
AU - Schaffartzik, Anke
AU - Haberl, Helmut
AU - Kastner, Thomas
AU - Wiedenhofer, Dominik
AU - Eisenmenger, Nina
AU - Erb, Karl Heinz
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 by Yale University.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - Land use is recognized as a pervasive driver of environmental impacts, including climate change and biodiversity loss. Global trade leads to "telecoupling" between the land use of production and the consumption of biomass-based goods and services. Telecoupling is captured by accounts of the upstream land requirements associated with traded products, also commonly referred to as land footprints. These accounts face challenges in two main areas: (1) the allocation of land to products traded and consumed and (2) the metrics to account for differences in land quality and land-use intensity. For two main families of accounting approaches (biophysical, factor-based and environmentally extended inputoutput analysis), this review discusses conceptual differences and compares results for land footprints. Biophysical approaches are able to capture a large number of products and different land uses, but suffer from a truncation problem. Economic approaches solve the truncation problem, but are hampered by the limited disaggregation of sectors and products. In light of the conceptual differences, the overall similarity of results generated by both types of approaches is remarkable. Diametrically opposed results for some of the world's largest producers and consumers of biomass-based products, however, make interpretation difficult. This review aims to provide clarity on some of the underlying conceptual issues of accounting for land footprints.
AB - Land use is recognized as a pervasive driver of environmental impacts, including climate change and biodiversity loss. Global trade leads to "telecoupling" between the land use of production and the consumption of biomass-based goods and services. Telecoupling is captured by accounts of the upstream land requirements associated with traded products, also commonly referred to as land footprints. These accounts face challenges in two main areas: (1) the allocation of land to products traded and consumed and (2) the metrics to account for differences in land quality and land-use intensity. For two main families of accounting approaches (biophysical, factor-based and environmentally extended inputoutput analysis), this review discusses conceptual differences and compares results for land footprints. Biophysical approaches are able to capture a large number of products and different land uses, but suffer from a truncation problem. Economic approaches solve the truncation problem, but are hampered by the limited disaggregation of sectors and products. In light of the conceptual differences, the overall similarity of results generated by both types of approaches is remarkable. Diametrically opposed results for some of the world's largest producers and consumers of biomass-based products, however, make interpretation difficult. This review aims to provide clarity on some of the underlying conceptual issues of accounting for land footprints.
KW - Environmental accounting
KW - Environmental input-output analysis
KW - Industrial ecology
KW - Land footprint
KW - Land use
KW - Trade
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84934884722&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/jiec.12258
DO - 10.1111/jiec.12258
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84934884722
SN - 1088-1980
VL - 19
SP - 703
EP - 714
JO - Journal of Industrial Ecology
JF - Journal of Industrial Ecology
IS - 5
ER -