This report analyses the use of IACS and other datasets for reporting and accounting Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and removals in the land use sector.
The land use sector comprises land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) as well as agriculture, jointly referred to as agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU).
Decision 529/2013/EU of the European Council and the Parliament of 21 May 2013 brings the LULUCF sector in the EU emission accounting obligations. These new accounting obligations for EU member states are phased in over a period extending to 2022.
This Report, as part of work performed by the JRC for DG Climate Action under an Administrative Arrangement (AA), aims at exploring the usefulness for cropland management (CM) and grazing land management (GM) accounting of the vast amount of data already regularly collected on the EU level in the context of environmental and agricultural policies.
One of the most promising datasets to meet LULUCF reporting obligations is the “Integrated Administration and Control System” (IACS) that has been set up by all member states to manage the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy, and its GIS, “the Land Parcel Identification System” (LPIS).
The data the LPIS holds are geo-referenced polygons of land parcels (units of management or production), and information on the type of land cover, as a minimum in terms of broad categories such as arable land, grassland, permanent crops, and broad families of crops, with their area (eligible hectares).
The LPIS is a pan-EU database that provides very detailed and accurate information on the status of agricultural land cover at any given time since 2005. The potential of the LPIS to efficiently track land use changes is derived from its pan-European semantic definition of agricultural land cover types, and the mandatory adequate update cycle of the dataset.
This study assessed other potential datasets, including Eurostat “Land Use/Cover Area Frame Survey” (LUCAS); the Farm Structure Surveys (FSS); the Farm Accountancy Data Network; CORINE Land Cover.JRC.D.5-Food Securit
