Land use - State and impacts (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia)

SOER 2010 Common environmental theme (Deprecated)

Topics: Land use Soil Resource efficiency and waste

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SOER Common environmental theme from Macedonia the former Yugoslavian Republic of

Topic: Land

Published: 26 Nov 2010 Modified: 11 May 2020

The Republic’s total area is 25 713 km² which, according to CORINE Land Cover (CLC) 2006, has the following land distribution:

Table 1: Land distribution, according to the CLC Nomenclature

	Land Cover, Level 1	Percentage of total territory
1	Artificial surfaces	1.6
2	Agriculture	36.3
3	Forest and Semi-natural areas	59.8
4	Wetlands	0.1
5	Water	2.2

Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia did not take part in CLC2000. However, the CLC1990 inventory, completed in 2000, based on the images of 1995-1996, was accepted as CLC2000. All the figures about changes presented here are based on these data.

The CLC changes between 1990 and 2006 cover an area of about 35 565 ha, which is around 1.4 % of the total area of the country.

During the period 1990-2006, the trends of increases of artificial surfaces, wetlands and water bodies and decreases of agricultural areas, forests and semi-natural areas were similar to those during the previous decade.

Table 2: Land cover changes (ha), period 1990-2006, according to the CLC Nomenclature

	Class	Decrease	Increase	Total change
1	Artificial Surfaces	385	2 624	2 239
2	Agricultural Areas	7 423	4 516	-2 907
3	Forest and Semi-natural Areas	27 564	26 720	-844
4	Wetlands	60	84	24
5	Water Bodies	81	1 569	1 488

Changes in land structure connected with agriculture, as well as increases of artificial surfaces, uptake or soil sealing have negative environmental impacts. Such changes cause loss of soil as a resource supporting food production, and decrease both biodiversity and carbon sinks.

It is evident that the main impact is on agricultural areas, presented on Table 3.

Table 3: Main land cover changes, period 1990-2006, according to the CLC nomenclature

Class from	Class to	Hectares
Agriculture areas	Artificial surfaces	1 823
Forest and semi-natural areas	Artificial surfaces	403

A more detailed view of these changes is given in the Figure 3.

Legend of Figure 3: CLC Codes description

CLC Code	Description	CLC Code	Description
112	Discontinuous urban fabric	231	Pastures
121	Industrial or commercial units	242	Complex cultivation patterns
122	Road and rail networks and associated land	243	Land principally occupied by agriculture, with significant areas of natural vegetation
131	Mineral extraction sites	311	Broad-leaved forest
132	Dump sites	312	Coniferous forest
133	Construction sites	313	Mixed forest
142	Sport and leisure facilities	321	Natural grassland
211	Non-irrigated arable land	322	Moors and heathland
221	Vineyards	324	Transitional woodland/shrub

The main negative impact is on complex cultivation areas (CLC Code 242) with more than 40% change from agriculture areas to artificial surfaces.

The other main change, of around 35 %, is to non-irrigated arable land (CLC Code 211).

It is interesting that a large part of the changes are to pastures (CLC code 231), where changes are to mineral extraction sites (CLC code 131) and dump sites (CLC code 132) with only a small number changed to construction sites (CLC code 133). These trends are in direct relation to the:

increased number of permits issued by the Ministry of Economy for exploitation of mineral sites;
problems in local self-government with setting-up dump sites, especially after the process of decentralisation.

Spatial distributions of these changes are shown on the Map 1.

It is evident that the biggest part of the changes occurred in the west part of the country. This corresponds to the rapid economic development in this area.