Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Germany’s Agricultural Land Footprint and the Impact of Import Pattern Allocation

Klaus Josef Hennenberg
* ORCID logo ,
Swantje Gebhardt
,
Florian Wimmer
,
Martin Distelkamp
,
Christian Lutz
ORCID logo ,
Hannes Böttcher
,
Rüdiger Schaldach
Version 1 : Received: 29 November 2021 / Approved: 1 December 2021 / Online: 1 December 2021 (18:08:00 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Hennenberg, K.J.; Gebhardt, S.; Wimmer, F.; Distelkamp, M.; Lutz, C.; Böttcher, H.; Schaldach, R. Germany’s Agricultural Land Footprint and the Impact of Import Pattern Allocation. Sustainability 2022, 14, 105. Hennenberg, K.J.; Gebhardt, S.; Wimmer, F.; Distelkamp, M.; Lutz, C.; Böttcher, H.; Schaldach, R. Germany’s Agricultural Land Footprint and the Impact of Import Pattern Allocation. Sustainability 2022, 14, 105.

Abstract

Footprints are powerful indicators for evaluating the impact of the bioeconomy of a country on environmental goods, domestically and abroad. In this study, we apply a hybrid approach combining a Multi-Regional Input-Output model and land use modelling to compute the agricultural land footprint (aLF). Furthermore, we added information on land-use change to the analysis and allocated land conversion to specific commodities. The German case study shows that the aLF abroad is larger by a factor of 2.5 to 3 than the aLF in Germany. In 2005 and 2010, conversion of natural and semi-natural land-cover types abroad allocated to Germany due to import increases was 2.5 times higher than the global average. Import increases to Germany slowed down in 2015 and 2020, reducing land conversion attributed to the German bioeconomy to the global average. The case study shows that the applied land footprint provides clear and meaningful information for policymakers and other stakeholders. The presented methodological approach can be applied to other countries and regions covered in the underlying database EXIOBASE. It can be adapted, also for an assessment of other ecosystem functions, such as water or soil fertility.

Keywords

bioeconomy 1; footprint analysis 2; land use modelling 3; Multi-Regional Input-Output (MRIO) model 4; land conversion 5; biodiversity 6; ecosystem functions 7

Subject

Environmental and Earth Sciences, Environmental Science

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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