Who takes the land ? Quantifying the use of built-up land by economic activities to assess biodiversity-related transition risks in France
Mathilde Salin & Etienne de L’Estoile
Abstract
The mandate of central banks in the Eurosystem includes the maintenance of financial stability. To this end, these institutions have started investigating the economic and financial risks that could emerge from the ecological transition due to misalignments of current business models with ambitious climate or biodiversity transition policies. In France, the objective to reach a “no net land-take” (NNLT) target by 2050, and a reduction of land-take by half by 2030, was recently written into the law to protect agricultural land and natural ecosystems from conversion into built-up areas. If NNLT were to reduce access to real estate or make it more expensive, companies in sectors relying strongly on land for their production process could be exposed to transition risks. This paper investigates this heterogeneous exposure. Using cadastral data and geolocated information on French firms, we develop and explore accounts tracing back the annual use of built-up land (a stock) and the annual land take (a flow) by each economic sector. This new dataset paves the way for the development of stress tests aiming to assess the consequences of the transition on financial stability.