New Method to Assess Territorial Land Occupation Pressures

Growing pressures on land arise from competing demands of food, energy, urbanization, and ecosystem conservation within a finite territorial surface. Existing indicators, such as ecological footprint or biocapacity, provide aggregated assessments but do not quantify how close a territory is to fully occupying its exploitable land under specific demographic and policy assumptions. We introduce the Territorial Land Occupation Rate (TLOR), measuring the ratio of land required for agriculture, artificialized surfaces, energy production, and ecosystem preservation to total exploitable land. TLOR accounts for population size and policy-dependent parameters, allowing consistent scenario comparisons. We apply TLOR to metropolitan France using recent data and examine two contrasting scenarios: (i) an energy-transition pathway with increased nuclear and biofuel production replacing fossil fuels, and (ii) a reindustrialization scenario phasing out fossil and nuclear energy while expanding industrial activity and renewables. In the first scenario, fossil-fuel replacement fully occupies exploitable land, leaving little or no margin for other land uses. In the second, TLOR exceeds unity, indicating that land constraints conflict with current population levels. TLOR provides a transparent, flexible tool for evaluating land-use feasibility and trade-offs under demographic and policy choices.