To reduce land consumption, we need to promote large-scale industrial projects
David Cousquer
May 28, 2024
Today, land preservation is an ecological imperative. But how can this be reconciled with the need for reindustrialization? Blocking major industrial projects is not necessarily the solution...👇🏻
In a previous publication, based on data collected in the Trendeo database for France, we showed that productivity per job in industrial investment varied considerably, depending on the size of the project.
Output per job rises sharply with project size, varying by a factor of 1 to 30 between small projects (less than €2m invested) and the largest projects (over €250m).
Counter-intuitively, large-scale projects are also land-saving.
Using only the 516 data for which we have land area and amount invested (12% of industrial projects from 2009 to 2023), we have estimated final production in millions of euros in the four project categories selected.
The results show that to produce 1 billion euros worth of industrial goods, you need :
- 🌳🌳250 hectares with investments of less than 2 million euros ;
- 🌳90 hectares with investments ranging from 2 to 50 million euros;
- 🌱56 hectares with investments ranging from 50 to 250 million euros ;
- and only 🌾19 hectares for projects costing over 250 million euros.
While the preservation of undeveloped land is a priority in the fight against global warming and the preservation of biodiversity, these data show that large-scale projects can, in the final analysis, be economical in terms of total surface area. Even if their individual surface areas are impressive, they consume less land, for the same final output, than a multitude of smaller projects.
However, this general reasoning doesn't apply to all industrial sectors: we can't concentrate the 27 million baguettes of bread consumed daily in France on fifteen or so sites replacing our 30,000 or so bakeries.
On the other hand, for products that are easy to store and transport, opposition in principle to major projects is not necessarily ecological.