Modelling the EU Land Footprint

As a major global trader in bio-based products, the EU monitors its consumption’s land demands both domestically and internationally.
To this end, the JRC developed a comprehensive and transparent model to estimate the land footprint of EU consumption, distinguishing between domestic land use and “virtual” land embodied in trade.
This model, based on official data sources and updated annually, has undergone peer review, leading to key methodological refinements.
 

Land footprint model

The EPLCA, in collaboration with Eurostat, developed a model providing annual estimates of the EU’s land footprint, i.e. the area of land needed to produce the products we consume.
The model examines over 500 food and bio-based products, including timber, and accounts for the land used in and outside the EU to grow domestically produced and imported products, distinguishing between cropland, grassland, and forest land.
The model also re-elaborates trade data to correctly assign an imported product to the country where agricultural or forest land was used to produce it. For instance, the cropland embedded in EU imports of chocolate from Switzerland and consumed in the EU is assigned to the countries where the cocoa was originally cultivated. This approach provides a detailed view of the EU's global land use demand.
Estimates are provided from 2014-2021 and will be updated yearly on the Eurostat database.