Who takes the land? Quantifying the use of built-up land by economic sectors to assess biodiversity-related transition risks in France

The Institute of Economics will hold a seminar meeting as part of its Seminar Series on Tuesday, November 14, 2023: Mathilde Salin from CIRED and Banque de France will present the paper “Who takes the land? Quantifying the use of built-up land by economic sectors to assess biodiversity-related transition risks in France".

Abstract:

In 2021, the French Parliament voted a new law aiming for "no net land take" (NNLT) by 2050, while the rate of land take should be halved by 2030. These objectives are notably justified by the fact that land take, defined as the conversion of agricultural, forest and other semi-natural and natural land into urban and other artificial land, drives biodiversity loss and affects soils functions. Because they use built-up land to produce, and contribute to land take, economic sectors will very likely be affected by this new policy. This paper investigates this exposure. Using cadastral data and geolocated information on French firms, we develop accounts tracing back the annual use of built-up land (a stock) and the annual land take (a flow) by economic sectors. Our results show that there is a strong time-varying sectoral heterogeneity regarding land-use and land take, with some sectors (e.g. trade, manufacturing or accommodation services) being important users of built-up land, and others (e.g. trade) being important land takers. Then, we combine these new accounts with additional - including financial - data, and propose a novel multi-criteria risk matrix to assess the risk faced by each sector in a "severe but plausible" scenario of increasing land prices induced by the NNLT policy. Our results show that, because of their relatively high adaptive capacity, the sectors contributing most significantly to land take may not necessarily be those which are most vulnerable.

The Seminar will be held in Aula 3.

For online partecipation use this link.