Affluence drives the global displacement of land use

By Jan Weinzettel, Edgar G. Hertwich, G. P. Peters, Kjartan Steen‐Olsen, A. Galli. 2013

623 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasing affluence is often postulated as a main driver for the human footprint on biologically productive areas, identified among the main causes of biodiversity loss, but causal relationships are obscured by international trade. Here, we trace the use of land and ocean area through international supply chains to final consumption, modeling agricultural, food, and forestry products on a high level of resolution while also including the land requirements of manufactured goods and services. In 2004, high-income countries required more biologically productive land per capita than low-income countries, but this connection could only be identified when land used to produce internationally traded products was taken into account, because higher-income countries tend to displace a larger fraction of land use. The equivalent land and ocean area footprint of nations increased by a third for each doubling of income, with all variables analyzed on a per capita basis. This increase came largely from imports, which increased proportionally to income. Export depended mostly on the capacity of countries to produce useful biomass, the biocapacity. Our analysis clearly shows that countries with a high biocapacity per capita tend to spare more land for nature. Biocapacity per capita can be increased through more intensive production or by reducing population density. The net displacement of land use from high-income to low-income countries amounted to 6% of the global land demand, even though high-income countries had more land available per capita than low-income countries. In particular, Europe and Japan placed high pressure on ecosystems in lower-income countries.

Subfields: Ecology, Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d97b4e2048bd56461500d3c282e4ac67dd2b9228

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Citations in the corpus

Understanding the relationships between ecosystem services and poverty alleviation: A conceptual framework (2014, neutral): “Recent work that demonstrates the displaced impacts of higher consumption lifestyles (e.g. DeFries et al., 2010; Weinzettel et al., 2013), including within rural developing country communities (Cavendish, 2000), have served to challenge this portrayal.”
The Global Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus (2018, background): “, imports) appears to be positively related to income (Weinzettel et al., 2013).”
The material footprint of nations (2013, methodology): “(13) in a study of the raw material consumption (RMC) of the European Union (EU).”
Reserves and trade jointly determine exposure to food supply shocks (2016, background): “…24% of the food that is consumed worldwide is available through international trade (e.g., D’Odorico et al 2014); likewise, 24% of the global agricultural land (Weinzettel et al 2013) and 23% of the freshwater resources used for food production (D’Odorico and Rulli 2013) are accessed through trade.”
Rethinking Agricultural Trade Relationships in an Era of Globalization (2015, background): “In contrast, recent value-based MRIO studies indicated that China was a net exporter of embodied cropland (Weinzettel et al. 2013, Yu et al. 2013, Kastner et al. 2014b).”
Human appropriation of land for food: The role of diet (2016, background): “Land use and the environmental impacts 17 associated with agricultural production are also increasingly displaced from the country of 18 consumption, through international trade of food commodities (Erb et al., 2009; Weinzettel et al., 2013; 19 Yu et al., 2013).”
Agricultural and forestry trade drives large share of tropical deforestation emissions (2019, background): “, 2014), particularly for the developing world, as well as a driver of land use (Weinzettel et al., 2013), forestry (Kastner et al.”
Measuring telecouplings in the global land system: A review and comparative evaluation of land footprint accounting methods (2015, neutral): “Others set up physical satellite accounts to model crop flows and related embodied land from agricultural production to the first use stage, for example, wheat flows from agriculture to food processing and livestock production, and track the remaining parts of the supply chains within monetary IO mo”