Future Land Use Patterns in Europe

Abstract

Land is a key resource for most socio-economic activities (agriculture, wood production, industry, recreation) and infrastructure (settlements, transportation and communication networks), and a vital component of natural ecosystems (such as forests). The use of land is characterized by large transformations over time (for example, Wolman and Fournier, 1987 present a state-of-the-art view on the availability of land for agriculture, as well as the quality of the land that is required to produce food and fiber, including the major types of land transformations in agriculture). The transformation of European land results from a complex set of interactions. The most important include:

• i) socio-economic and historical changes, such as in land ownership and tenure, population growth, urbanization, industrialization, development of technology, the establishment of transportation and communication networks. Grigg (1987) describes the constant modification of the environment by human interference to facilitate the production of crops and livestock;

• ii) political decisions, such as subsidies and taxes for using the land; in addition, decisions like the Corn Laws of Britain in 1846 also determined land use patterns, since they made it easier for overseas producers to sell wheat in that country; a more recent example of policy decisions being important for land use patterns is the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the European Economic Communities (EEC), established in 1957 to achieve, among other things, an increasing level of self-sufficiency in food consumption and an equilibrium in the markets of agricultural products (EC Commission, 1985); and

• iii) environmental conditions, particularly climatic factors and soil quality.