Land take in Functional Urban Areas, 2012-2018

Land take and the associated soil sealing causes less resilient ecosystems through landscape fragmentation and habitats destruction, soil sealing, decreased carbon sequestration and impaired flood protection. These processes are one of the major drivers of land degradation. Restoring wetlands, peatlands, coastal ecosystems, forests, grasslands and agricultural soils are essential for avoiding biodiversity decline and for climate change adaptation. This dashboard presents an overview of land take processes in Functional Urban Areas in EEA and EU member states for the years 2012-2018. The amount of land take was derived from the Urban Atlas datasets of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service.