

Is achieving no net land take by 2050 in Europe still realistic? While France continues to relax its Climate and Resilience law and the European Union has not included any legally binding measures regarding land take in its soil protection strategy, Le Monde and its partners' collaborative investigation exposes the real scale at which the destruction of natural areas has been playing out in Europe.
After 10 months of investigation, the "Green to Grey" project, conducted by around 40 journalists and scientists from 11 countries and coordinated by the Arena for Journalism in Europe network, reveals the extent to which natural areas have been destroyed across Europe. According to the teams' calculations, EU land consumption is twice as high as the official estimates reported by the European Environment Agency (EEA).
In 2011, through its "Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe," Brussels set a (non-binding) target to reduce the EU's yearly land take to 800 km2 – the equivalent of more than 100,000 football fields.
Fifteen years later, the EU is now artificializing more than 1,000 km2 of land per year, even though it no longer has to account for the United Kingdom. The teams were able to calculate this figure using a new method, based on a machine learning model's analysis of satellite images taken between 2018 and 2023. Across a swath of geographic Europe – an area including 39 countries – 1,500 km2 of natural land is being destroyed each year.
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