Long-term trajectories of the human appropriation of net primary production: Lessons from six national case studies

Fridolin Krausmann, Simone Gingrich, Helmut Haberl, Karl-Heinz Erb, Annabella Musel, Thomas Kastner, Norbert Kohlheb, Maria Niedertscheider and Elmar Schwarzlmüller

Ecological Economics, 2012, vol. 77, issue C, 129-138

Abstract: The ‘human appropriation of net primary production’ (HANPP) is an integrated socio-ecological indicator measuring effects of land use on ecological biomass flows. Based on published data for Austria, Hungary, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain and the UK, this paper investigates long-term trends in aboveground HANPP and discusses the relations between population, economic growth, changes in biomass use and land-use intensity and their influences on national HANPP trajectories. During early stages of industrialization, population growth and increasing demand for biomass drive land-cover change, often resulting in deforestation, which raises HANPP. During later stages, industrialization of agriculture boosts agricultural yields often faster than biomass demand grows, resulting in stable or even declining HANPP. Technological change improves agricultural area-efficiency (biomass provision per unit area), thereby decoupling population and economic growth from HANPP. However, these efficiency gains require large inputs of fossil fuels and agrochemicals resulting in pressures on ecosystems and emissions. Our findings corroborate the argument that HANPP alone cannot – as sometimes suggested – be used as a simple measure of carrying capacity. Nevertheless, analyses of long-term HANPP trajectories in combination with accounts of material and energy flows can provide important insights into the sustainability of land use, thereby helping to understand limits to growth.

Keywords: Human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP); Biomass; Land-use intensity; Long-term socio-ecological research (LTSER); Forest transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800912000833
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:77:y:2012:i:c:p:129-138

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.02.019

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().