Policy review on decoupling : development of indicators to assess decoupling of economic development and environmental pressure in the EU-25 and AC-3 countries

Summary The figure below shows the GALU for EU-15 and ACC-13 in comparison with the world’s availability of agricultural land in total and arable land plus permanent crops land in particular. From this picture, it seems that the global agricultural land use of the EU and ACC is in line with agricultural land available for each human being in the world. However, several arguments (as discussed before) speak rather for an orientation towards the global availability of arable land and permanent crops land instead of total agricultural area. With this reference, the EU’s and ACC’s GALUs would rather exceed global limits on a per capita basis. Furthermore, the global per capita availability of both, agricultural land and arable land and permanent crops land, is declining more rapidly than the GALUs of EU and ACC. Also, the agricultural land use intensity (in terms of fertilizer and pesticides use etc.) should be taken into consideration as well. This may put the EU’s global agricultural land use into a different perspective than the mere hectares per capita show.