International Trade, Material Flows and Land Use: Developing a Physical Trade Balance for the European Union

The environmental impacts of globalization and further liberalization of international trade today are on the top of the policy agenda in a number of international organizations. While the trade relations between two countries or regions may be balanced in monetary terms, they may at the same time be characterized by a substantial inequality with regard to the flows of natural resources. Thus some regions may systematically exploit the ecological capacity of other regions by importing resource intensive products and exporting wastes. In the last 10 to 15 years there has been extensive research on material flows mainly on the national level. However, empirical studies on material flows in international trade so far are very limited. In the last few years studies have been presented, which link material flow accounting and input-output analysis (based on monetary input-output tables) for the calculation of indirect material flows through intermediate production. This procedure has also been applied for calculating direct and indirect land appropriation. The compilation of the first physical input-output tables for some western European countries in the 1990s opened new possibilities for linking physical accounting and input-output analysis. Physical input-output analysis has so far been applied only for selected materials in single-country studies. It has neither been used for assessments of material flows in international trade nor for any land-related studies. In this report first steps towards the elaboration of a physical trade balance for the EU-15 are undertaken. Concerning the methodology of input-output analysis, three alternative approaches will be presented and discussed. In the empirical part, a physical trade balance for direct material flows of the EU is presented, disaggregated by world regions as well as product and material groups. In order to assess indirect resource requirements induced by imports and exports, a physical input-output model for the EU-15 is developed, based on physical input-output tables already published. This model is then used for assessing the overall resource requirements for the production of exports from EU-15 to the rest of the world. By applying physical input-output analysis, direct and indirect resource requirements will be calculated concerning both material flows and land appropriation

Review of land flow accounting methods and recommendations for further development

Robust land footprint indicators can potentially extend the consumption-based resource use indicator of the German sustainability strategy, which focuses on abiotic resources including fossil fuels, metals, and construction and industrial minerals and decidedly excludes biotic resources. Various approaches exist for quantifying the land embodied in international trade flows and consumption, i.e. the land footprint. These can be classified into a) environmental-economic accounting approaches, applying input-output analysis and tracking supply chains in monetary values, b) physical accounting approaches, using an accounting framework based on data for production, trade and utilization of agricultural and forestry commodities and tracking supply chains in physical units, and c) hybrid accounting, combining elements from both environmental-economic and physical accounting. The results of recent studies vary widely, indicating a lack of robustness and thus hampering their application in policy making. This report provides an in-depth review of the current state of the art in measuring land footprints. We identify differences in available accounting methods and indicate their shortcomings, which are mainly attributable to the product and supply chain coverage and detail, and biases introduced by the use of monetary flows as a proxy for actual physical flows. We offer options and give clear recommendations for the further development of actual and virtual global biomass and land flow accounting methods, particularly highlighting the advantages of hybrid accounting approaches as a framework for the robust and transparent assessment of land footprints associated with global biomass flows

The global cropland footprint of the non-food bioeconomy

A rapidly growing share of global agricultural areas is devoted to the production of biomass for non-food purposes. The derived products include, for example, biofuels, textiles, detergents or cosmetics. Given the far-reaching global implications of an expanding non-food bioeconomy, an assessment of the bioeconomy’s resource use from a footprint perspective is urgently needed. We determine the global cropland footprint of non-food products with a hybrid land flow accounting model combining data from the Food and Agriculture Organization and the multi-regional input-output model EXIOBASE. The globally interlinked model covers all cropland areas used for the production of crop- and animal-based non-food commodities for the years from 1995 to 2010. We analyse global patterns of raw material producers, processers and consumers of bio-based non-food products, with a particular focus on the European Union. Results illustrate that the EU is a major processer and the number one consumer region of non-food cropland, despite being only the fifth largest producing region. Two thirds of the cropland required to satisfy EU non-food consumption are located in other world regions, giving rise to a significant dependency on imported products and to potential impacts on distant ecosystems. With almost 29% in 2010, oilseed production, used to produce, for example, biofuels, detergents and polymers, represents the dominant share in the EU’s non-food cropland footprint. There is also a significant contribution of more traditional non-food biomass uses such as fibre crops (for textiles) and animal hides and skins (for leather products). Our study emphasises the importance of comprehensively assessing the implications of the non-food bioeconomy expansion as envisaged in various policy strategies, such as the Bioeconomy Strategy of the European Commission

Development of consumption-based land use indicators

With this UFOPLAN project on land use indicators, the German Federal Environment Agency aimed at further developing indicators from a consumption perspective in support of Germany’s sustainability strategy, covering both area-based and impact-oriented land footprint indicators.The project also aimed at calculating selected land footprint indicators for Germany and the EU. These indicators should provide an improved understanding of the global teleconnections of consumption and land use relevant for policy making towards achieving sustainable land use. This synthesis report presents the key results from this project. First, we present a structured overview of existing approaches for estimating land footprintsand describe their technical and structural characteristicsas well as their strengths and weaknesses. This leads to the specification of a hybrid methodology as the preferred calculation approach. In the second part, we present the developed innovative hybrid land footprint method, consisting of a global land flow accounting and trade model capturing commodity flows in physical units to track embodied land along global supply chains. For non-food commodities the supply chains were complemented by an environmental input-output model. This method was used to calculate the cropland, grassland and forestland footprint of Germany and the EU. Finally, an overview of existing indicator systems for representing the environmental impacts of land use was provided and their complementary usage to extend area-based land footprints was discussed. A few of these complementary indicators were also quantified, most notably the deforestation footprint. The synthesis report closes with an overview of the thematic areas that need to be addressed in future research

Mapping global extraction of abiotic and biotic raw materials

Reducing global environmental and social impacts related to final consumption is a significant societal as well as scientific challenge, especially as production and consumption are increasingly geographically disconnected via complex supply chains. Tracing the interlinkages between consumption and production as well as related impacts in a spatially explicit way can contribute to overcoming this challenge. Currently, the spatial resolution of global models of raw material extraction, trade and consumption is limited to the national level. Thus, they fail to link specific supply chains to the actual geographical location of production and related impacts. Detailed global spatiotemporal datasets would allow tracing the heterogeneity of environmental and social conditions within producing countries. In this contribution, we present our preliminary results mapping global biotic and abiotic raw materials extraction in 5-arc-minutes (around 10 km x 10 km at the equator) grid cell level, starting from the year 2000. Our datasets will include around 60 different raw materials, covering crops, fishery, fossil energy resources, metal ores and non-metallic minerals. In the future, our database will also include spatially explicit data on environmental and social impacts related to the extraction of these raw materials. The new database, methods, and algorithms will be openly available to the research community and the wider public, supporting open and reproducible science. Our novel database will allow developing new methods to assess the interlinkages between consumption and various environmental and social impacts related to extraction on a grid cell level. It can boost the spatially explicit assessments of supply chains and consumption patterns in both developed and developing countries, which is crucial for the design of international policy instruments to achieve sustainable production and consumption patterns

Extending land footprints towards characterizing sustainability of land use

The global trade of biomass-based products leads to an increasing regional decoupling of the area of production and consumption. Area-based land footprint calculations attribute the extents of land use required to prevailing national consumption patterns. Another report (Fischer et al., 2016) of the present study describes the methodology for the calculation of area-based footprints and presents results for Germany and the EU. Beyond area extents, additional information is needed to assess the sustainability of land use, requiring further analyses regarding environmental impacts and preservation of land quality and ecosystem services. This report discusses extensions of area-based land footprints with meaningful impact-oriented indicators for the assessment of the effects of different consumption patterns on the ecosystems and sustainability of land use. First, existing indicators for representing the environmental impacts of land use are introduced in the context of their linkages and complementarity to area-based land footprints. The report discusses the following key indicators, which were identified as particularly relevant during an export workshop: System indicators, which qualify the area-based footprints across globally very different potential land productivities,deforestation footprint, energy use in agriculture, and irrigation water use in agriculture classified by degree of water scarcity. We introduce the methods developed for the quantification of system indicators for cropland and grassland footprints and for the deforestation footprint, and present results for Germany and the EU

Review of land flow accounting methods and recommendations for further development

Robust land footprint indicators can potentially extend the consumption-based resource use indicator of the German sustainability strategy, which focuses on abiotic resources including fossil fuels, metals, and construction and industrial minerals and decidedly excludes biotic resources. Various approaches exist for quantifying the land embodied in international trade flows and consumption, i.e. the land footprint. These can be classified into a) environmental-economic accounting approaches, applying input-output analysis and tracking supply chains in monetary values, b) physical accounting approaches, using an accounting framework based on data for production, trade and utilization of agricultural and forestry commodities and tracking supply chains in physical units, and c) hybrid accounting, combining elements from both environmental-economic and physical accounting. The results of recent studies vary widely, indicating a lack of robustness and thus hampering their application in policy making. This report provides an in-depth review of the current state of the art in measuring land footprints. We identify differences in available accounting methods and indicate their shortcomings, which are mainly attributable to the product and supply chain coverage and detail, and biases introduced by the use of monetary flows as a proxy for actual physical flows. We offer options and give clear recommendations for the further development of actual and virtual global biomass and land flow ac-counting methods, particularly highlighting the advantages of hybrid accounting approaches as a framework for the robust and transparent assessment of land footprints associated with global bio-mass flows. German Title: Kritische Betrachtung von Methoden zur Berechnung von Flächenfußabdrucksindikatoren und Empfehlungen für deren Weiterentwicklun

An open database on global coal and metal mine production

While the extraction of natural resources has been well documented and analysed at the national level, production trends at the level of individual mines are more difficult to uncover, mainly due to poor availability of mining data with sub-national detail. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by presenting an open database on global coal and metal mine production on the level of individual mines. It is based on manually gathered information from more than 1900 freely available reports of mining companies, where every data point is linked to its source document, ensuring full transparency. The database covers 1171 individual mines and reports mine-level production for 80 different materials in the period 2000-2021. Furthermore, also data on mining coordinates, ownership, mineral reserves, mining waste, transportation of mining products, as well as mineral processing capacities (smelters and mineral refineries) and production is included

Supply versus use designs of environmental extensions in input–output analysis: Conceptual and empirical implications for the case of energy

Input–output analysis is one of the central methodological pillars of industrial ecology. However,the literature that discusses different structures of environmental extensions (EEs), that is, thescope of physical flows and their attribution to sectors in the monetary input–output table (MIOT),remains fragmented. This article investigates the conceptual and empirical implications of apply-ing two different but frequently used designs of EEs, using the case of energy accounting, whereone represents energy supply while the other energy use in the economy. We derive both exten-sions from an official energy supply–use dataset and apply them to the same single-region input–output (SRIO) model of Austria, thereby isolating the effect that stems from the decision for theextension design. We also crosscheck the SRIO results with energy footprints from the g lobalmulti-regional input–output (GMRIO) dataset EXIOBASE. Our results show that the ranking offootprints of final demand categories (e.g., household and export) is sensitive to the extensiondesign and that product-level results can vary by several orders of magnitude. The GMRIO-basedcomparison further reveals that for a few countries the supply-extension result can be twice thesize of the use-extension footprint (e.g., Australia and Norway). We propose a graph approachto provide a generalized framework to disclosing the design of EEs. We discuss the conceptualdifferences between the two extension designs by applying analogies to hybrid life-cycle assess-ment and conclude that our findings are relevant for monitoring of energy efficiency and emissionreduction targets and corporate footprint accounting

Surge in global metal mining threatens vulnerable ecosystems

Mining activities induce profound changes to societies and the environment they inhabit. With global extraction of metal ores doubling over the past two decades, pressures related to mining have dramatically increased. In this paper, we explore where growing global metal extraction has particularly taken effect. Using fine-grain data, we investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of mining of nine metal ores (bauxite, copper, gold, iron, lead, manganese, nickel, silver and zinc) across approximately 3,000 sites of extraction worldwide between 2000 and 2019. To approach the related environmental implications, we intersect mining sites with terrestrial biomes, protected areas, and watersheds categorised by water availability. We find that 79% of global metal ore extraction in 2019 originated from five of the six most species-rich biomes, with mining volumes doubling since 2000 in tropical moist forest ecosystems. We also find that half of global metal ore extraction took place at 20 km or less from protected territories. Further, 90% of all considered extraction sites correspond to below-average relative water availability, with particularly copper and gold mining occurring in areas with significant water scarcity. Our study has far-reaching implications for future global and local policy and resource management responses to mitigate the negative effects of the expected expansion of metal mining