Disaggregating the role of international and domestic trade in the global land system

Abstract. A fundamental question in land system science is the extent to which impacts are driven by international trade. Here, we review the studies which attribute land-related impacts (land use, land-use change, biodiversity loss, and land-use emissions) to international markets, finding a wide range of results, with 13–94 % of impacts driven by exports. We discuss the methodological choices and assumptions that explain this variation and reflect that ‘attributional’ approaches, which allocate impacts according to the total share of consumption, consistently find that international trade makes up less than 25 % of impacts in the land system. Conversely, three-quarters of impacts are allocated to domestic markets, which receive comparatively less attention in the land systems literature. We encourage the land system community to develop the data and methods necessary to unpack domestic markets, outline four approaches to do so, and reflect on what such analyses can tell us about the responsibility of different actors, value chain governance, and resilience within domestic markets.