CREEA report: Climate change issues and Kyoto accounting – Land use cover change accounts
Schütz H, Schmidt J (2014)
Publication info
Deliverable 6.2 of the EU FP7 project CREEA
Excerpt of executive summary
Land use and total (or gross) land use change data were analysed with focus on UNFCCC national inventory data and CORINE land cover data, and in comparison with FAO data and specific national data. For the European countries for which CORINE data are available this data base represents in most cases the preferable one with regard to land use change. The data quality and comprehensiveness however differs a lot between the individual countries. Due to restricted or unclear data availability other global or international data bases could not be used to derive data for gross land use change. Data from FAO and in particular the Global Forest Resources Assessment could be used to indirectly estimate net land use changes such as cropland expansion as a result of deforestation. This was not further elaborated here but specific studies on the issue exist. Allocation of land use (occupation) to industry sectors in SUTs can be done following the common approach for environmental extension data (see report to WP 7: Provision of data on land use by country and category).
Alignment of land use / land cover accounts with SEEA 2012 is currently hampered due to different classification systems. Further, available data do not fit with proposed SEEA categories which are characterised as being provisional.
With regard to land use change, our proposal is to keep it in a separate account by country/region which might be aggregated to a global account once comprehensive, harmonised data sets were available. The effects on land use change could then be included by linking the land occupation (as above) to the global market for land (the global LUC matrix).
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