Land consumption continues to decline

Land consumption continues to decline

The new use of land for building purposes has declined in Austria in the last two years. According to current data from the Federal Office for Metrology and Surveying (BEV) and the Federal Environment Agency, new land use slowed down significantly in 2024 for the second year in a row: specifically, 6.75 hectares of land were newly used every day in 2024 - a decrease of 15.3 percent compared to the previous year. The total area of ​​new annual use amounted to 24.7 square kilometers, after 29.2 square kilometers in 2023. In 2022 it was 43.6 square kilometers. This means that annual land consumption has been reduced by almost half within two years.
In total, seven percent of the total national area in Austria was used for gardens, buildings, operations, transport, leisure and mining areas in 2024 (= land use). Around half of this was sealed, i.e. built over, asphalted or concreted (= surface sealing). The sealing rate currently accounts for 3.7 percent of the national area.
New take-up has been steadily declining since the beginning of the 2000s. In the years 2000 to 2005, an average of 81 square kilometers were needed annually, and in the last four years not even half that amount (see table “Annual new land use in km²”).

Court of Auditors questions the upper limit of 2.5 hectares per day

The current government program sets a reduction in land consumption to 2.5 hectares per day, although it should be noted that no binding time horizon is specified for achieving this goal. Regardless of this, from the point of view of the Federal Construction Guild, this undifferentiated target contradicts the Federal Government's commitment to a balanced land policy, because it lumps together all projects - regardless of the degree of sealing and the economic consequences. The Austrian Association of Municipalities and the responsible state councils are still critical of this upper limit, which was inappropriately “prescribed” by the federal government.
The Court of Auditors also expressed criticism in the spring of this year. Background: the Court of Auditors examined the conduct of the Austrian Spatial Planning Conference (ÖROK) from November 2023 to April 2024. The ÖROK is an institution supported by the federal government, states, cities and municipalities to coordinate spatial planning and regional development at the national level. Among other things, she is responsible for developing the “Soil Strategy for Austria”, which was approved by all federal states at the beginning of 2024.
The Court of Auditors dedicated a separate chapter to this strategy in its audit report and drew the following conclusion regarding the 2.5 hectare target: "The federal government in 2002 wanted to reduce the increase in 'permanently sealed areas' in Austria to 2.5 hectares per day by 2010. The aim was to reduce it to a maximum of one tenth of the then average sealing of 25 hectares per day. A well-founded justification or well-founded methodological one The strategy did not contain any derivation of this target value.”(Source: “Austrian Spatial Planning Conference – Office and Land Strategy”, Report of the Court of Auditors, April 2025, page 72). In addition, it remains unclear “whether the target value referred to additional land use or surface sealing.”(Source: “Austrian Spatial Planning Conference – Office and Land Strategy”, Report of the Court of Auditors, April 2025, page 90)

Terminological clarifications necessary

The Court of Auditors also points out in its report that the terms used to define the target (sealed areas, land use, land use) were “not clearly defined”.(Source: “Austrian Spatial Planning Conference – Office and Land Strategy”, Report of the Court of Auditors, April 2025, page 12)
The Federal Construction Guild shares this view, as the term “land consumption” often leads to incorrect conclusions. For example, a parkland or a property with a single-family house and a flower meadow is considered 100% “used up” in the official statistics, even if in most cases only a small part of the entire property is actually sealed or built on. “Sealing” means that an impermeable layer covers the ground. “Used up” means that an area is no longer available for agriculture or forestry.
Conclusion: Only a fraction of the area used according to statistics is actually sealed. However, this differentiation would be crucial in order to be able to have an objective discussion about a balanced soil protection strategy.

Facts vs. emotions

In general, it can be observed that the public debate on the topic of land consumption in recent years has become increasingly populist and less and less fact-based: comparisons are often made that are very emotionally charged ("concreted over", football fields, etc.) or squares in urban (!) areas are used as representative examples of the supposedly excessive land consumption. Although such methods are certainly effective in their target group, they tend to be misleading: on the one hand, the (higher) percentage of land consumption is regularly used and presented as sealed (however, as already mentioned, the degree of sealing in Austria is only around half of the land consumption). On the other hand, it is (consciously?) overlooked that even an unsealed area is still considered used area: the Graz city park, the Linz Danube Park, the garden around a single-family house on the Vienna suburbs: all of this is considered used area in the official statistics, but they still make a positive contribution to the current challenges (e.g. heat in the city, the ability of the soil to seep away, etc.). In this way, all efforts to unseal urban areas are reduced to absurdity.
Instead of generalizations and misleading, the debate needs objectification and differentiation: contrary to the statements of various environmental NGOs, Austria is not the much-cited European champion when it comes to land use or land sealing. Rather, Austria is in the middle of the field across the EU. The “frontrunners” are Holland and Belgium with a sealing level that is almost four times higher. Germany follows in third place with a sealing level that is around twice as high as Austria.

The “Alliance with Common Sense” initiative carries out educational work

In order to bring the discussion back to an objective level, an alliance of building professionals has been formed in Austria to carry out important educational work. In particular, the statistical basis and possible negative consequences of an undifferentiated upper limit are shown. Such an upper limit would pose insoluble problems for communities with population growth and hinder the provision of housing for people: in the years 2021 to 2024, an average of 33.5 km² per year was used for construction purposes. With an area cap of 2.5 hectares per day, 24.5 km² would have to be saved per year. The question therefore inevitably arises as to where the growing population should live in the future.
In addition, substantial cuts in industrial and commercial construction, in public facilities such as schools and kindergartens and in the construction of infrastructure would be unavoidable. Further consequences would be rising land prices and the loss of jobs: if an area cap of 2.5 hectares per day was implemented, around 250,000 jobs would be at risk in the long term. Of these, around 105,000 were in industry, 72,000 in the construction industry and 73,000 in other indirectly affected economic sectors.(Source: “Land consumption: Effects of the planned upper limit on the labor market, residential construction and the expansion of infrastructure, Kreutzer Fischer Partner, January 2024)

Conclusion

For a serious quantification of an area cap, there is no mechanism that takes into account the different circumstances (e.g. immigration and emigration) in Austria's municipalities and with which targets can be developed at the local level. In any case, an arbitrarily and unilaterally set upper limit is not a solution, as it deprives municipalities of all scope for action and ignores the negative economic and socio-political consequences outlined above.
In contrast, a carefully thought-out land strategy for the sustainable development of Austria and corresponding planning security would be a positive approach. However, this must in any case include an overall consideration of all the criteria to be taken into account. Furthermore, it would be high time to anchor the actual surface sealing - instead of land consumption - as a central parameter in the relevant statistics and in the public discourse.