Trading Land: A Review of Approaches to Accounting for Upstream Land Requirements of Traded Products.

ABSTRACT: Land use is recognized as a pervasive driver of environmental impacts, including climate change and biodiversity loss. Global trade leads to "telecoupling" between the land use of production and the consumption of biomass-based goods and services. Telecoupling is captured by accounts of the upstream land requirements associated with traded products, also commonly referred to as land footprints. These accounts face challenges in two main areas: (1) the allocation of land to products traded and consumed and (2) the metrics to account for differences in land quality and land-use intensity. For two main families of accounting approaches (biophysical, factor-based and environmentally extended input-output analysis), this review discusses conceptual differences and compares results for land foot

SUBMITTER: Schaffartzik A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4973614 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature