Modelling the land footprint of EU consumption : methodology and results of the LAFO model version 2.0

The European Union is a major trading partner of bio-based products and commodities worldwide. It is therefore crucial to estimate the consequences of EU consumption in terms of the related land demand both domestically and outside the EU. Land footprinting methods inherently adopt life cycle thinking. They allow estimate land embodied in commodities and goods consumed by a country or region, distinguishing between domestic land and virtual land embodied in trade. This project aims to build a transparent and straightforward model that performs the yearly estimation of the EU's land footprint, using official data sources as a starting point. The first version of the land footprinting (LAFO) model here presented was published in De Laurentiis et al. (2022). This model was then peer reviewed, and a number of necessary methodological refinements were identified and implemented. This report presents the updated version of the land footprint model (hereafter the LAFO v2.0 model) by illustrating its conceptual design and methodological assumptions, the calculations performed, the underlying data sources, and the results yielded by the model for a chosen reference period, comparing them with the results of similar studies. Detailed results of the LAFO v2.0 model are presented for the EU27 relatively to the year 2021, showing that the EU was a net importer of cropland (net imports of 21.9 Mha) while being a net exporter of grassland (net exports of 3.3 Mha) and forest land (net exports 1.4 Mha*y) (1) embodied in bio-based products. The temporal evolution of the EU land footprint between 2014 and 2021 confirmed this finding throughout this timeframe with the exception of forest land for witch the net trade fluctuates over time. An analysis of the countries on which the EU was mostly relying for imports of virtual cropland, grassland, and forest land in 2021 was presented, illustrating how the extra EU land footprint is concentrated in relatively few countries varying according to the type of products (namely, for cropland, Argentina, Brazil, and Ukraine, while for forest land Russia, Brazil and Norway). When comparing the results yielded by the LAFO model with the existing literature, the estimations of the EU per capita cropland footprint and forest land footprint turn out to be aligned with other studies adopting a physical-based accounting approach. Less alignment is found in the case of the EU grassland footprint (both between this study and the existing literature and in general across different studies), confirming that the grassland footprint estimation is affected by higher uncertainty on input data, compared to cropland and forest land footprint.