Abstract
SummaryThe ongoing globalization process strengthens the connections between different geographic regions through trade. Biomass products, such as food, fiber, or bioenergy, are increasingly traded globally, thereby leading to telecouplings between distant, seemingly unrelated regions. For example, restrictions for agricultural production or changes in bioenergy demand in Europe or the United States might contribute to deforestation in Latin America or Sub‐Saharan Africa. One approach to analyze trade‐related land‐use effects of the global socioeconomic biomass metabolism is the “embodied human appropriation of net primary production” or eHANPP. eHANPP accounts allocate to any product the entire amount of the human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) that emerges throughout its supply chain. This allows consumption‐based accounts to move beyond simple area‐demand approaches by taking differences in natural productivity as well as in land‐use intensity into account, both across land‐use types as well as across world regions. In this article, we discuss the eHANPP related to the European Union's (EU) consumption of biomass products in the period 1986–2007, based on a consistent global trade data set derived from bilateral data. We find a considerable dependency of the EU on the appropriation of biological productivity outside its own boundaries, with increasing reliance on Latin America as a main supplier. By using the EU as an illustrative example, we demonstrate the usefulness of eHANPP for assessing land‐use impacts caused by nations’ socioeconomic activities and conclude that the eHANPP approach can provide useful information to better manage ecosystems globally in the face of an increasingly interconnected world.
Highlights
The volume of traded agricultural products is rising faster than the global production of biomass in agriculture and forestry (FAO 2014), thereby increasingly affecting global patterns of land use and land-use intensity (Meyfroidt et al 2010; Kastner et al 2014)
In the agricultural part of the consumption-based accounts (CBA), the contribution from production on own territory within the European Union (EU) countries declined from approximately 1.6 gigatons of dry matter biomass per year (Gt dm/yr) in 1986 to approximately 1.4 Gt dm/yr by 2007. Embodied human appropriation of net primary production (eHANPP) related to products consumed within the EU countries from imports increased throughout the study period, with eHANPP related to imports countries sourced from outside the EU larger than that sourced from inside the EU, albeit the latter exhibiting larger growth rates
Contrasting CBA and production-based accounts (PBA) reveals that the EU was a net importer in terms of eHANPP throughout the study period. eHANPP related to exported agricultural products grew as well, but, in this case, exports to other EU countries play a much larger role than exports to the rest of the world, which declined slightly over time
Summary
The volume of traded agricultural products is rising faster than the global production of biomass in agriculture and forestry (FAO 2014), thereby increasingly affecting global patterns of land use and land-use intensity (Meyfroidt et al 2010; Kastner et al 2014). The increasing number of trade links between countries and rising trade volumes, in particular, those of biomass-related products, result in a growing spatial disconnect between the places of production and the places where the products are being consumed (Erb et al 2009). The importance of trade-related telecouplings—that is, interdependencies between distant, seemingly unrelated regions—is growing (Guneralp et al 2013; Seto et al 2012; Liu et al 2013).
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