Abstract
This article presents a study based on the outputs from the LUISA Territorial modelling platform (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission) focused on regional and local future projections of land abandonment between 2015 and 2030. Spain is taken as representative of one of the countries highly affected by agricultural land abandonment in the European Union. The most relevant factors driving land abandonment (biophysical, agroeconomics, farm structure and demographic) are described and mapped. Results from the analysis reveal that the Galicia region, northern Spain (Asturias, Cantabria, Gipuzkoa, Bizkaia), north-eastern Spain (Aragón region), central Pyrenees/Ebro basin (Huesca, Navarra, Lleida) and south-eastern Spain (Murcia, Almería, Alicante, Málaga) are expected to undergo important abandonment processes. The study also concludes that land abandonment within mountainous, high nature value farmland and Natura 2000 areas is lower compared to the outside area without conservation and protection measures.
Highlights
Agricultural land abandonment is the largest land-use change process in Europe
While in the 19th century, the industrialization process and the end of World War II were the main causes of land abandonment [1], nowadays, EU agricultural policies, market pressures, depopulation, rapid urbanization or environmental factors have highly contributed to exacerbating the process [2]
LUISA, as a spatial-explicit model conceived to contribute to territorial impact assessment and analysis of EU trends and policies, can help to understand to what extent, in time and space, agricultural land abandonment will affect in different regions in Spain
Summary
Agricultural land abandonment is the largest land-use change process in Europe. The causes have been changing over time in the most developed European countries. A broad number of studies [2,6,11,12,13,14,15] identify a set of drivers that are commonly referred to as the following categories: (1) The environmental factors that constrain agricultural production (soil quality, slope, elevation, fertility, soil depth, seasonal climate, etc.); (2) the socioeconomic situation that expresses the lack of (farm) economic and demographic viability and stability (farm size, supply of labour, age of farmers, productivity levels, policy schemes, low land market mobility, farm investment and industrialisation, trades, etc.); (3) the regional context that measures the level of accessibility (to infrastructure, services and market), distance variables (to major settlements, to forest patches, to remote areas), EU agricultural policy instruments, rapid urbanization processes, population distribution and rural-urban migration; and (4) the mismanagement of soil and water resources leading to land degradation, soil erosion, overexploitation of groundwater resources causing water scarcity and salinization of croplands
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