Abstract
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 .
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the EU-FP7 project VOLANTE (grant agreement no. 265104), by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management (BMLFUW, contract UW.1.4.18/0081-V/10/2010), by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), project P20812-G11 and by the Research Council (‘Forschungsrat’) of the Alpen-Adria Universitaet Klagenfurt, Wien, Graz. It contributes to the Global Land Project (http://www.globallandproject.org).
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Haberl, H., Kastner, T., Schaffartzik, A., Erb, KH. (2016). How Far Does the European Union Reach? Analyzing Embodied HANPP. In: Haberl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., Krausmann, F., Winiwarter, V. (eds) Social Ecology. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33326-7_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33326-7_16
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