Recital (38)

Among the land take aspects, the growth of settlement areas is a process often driven by economic development needs, which entails a land use change from natural and semi-natural areas, including protected forests, natural grasslands, peatlands, agricultural and forestry land, gardens and parks, to settlement areas, for example as part of urban development. Settlement areas, as described in Regulation (EU) 2018/841, include all developed land, namely residential, transportation, commercial and production infrastructure of any size, unless they are already included under other land use categories. Settlement areas also include soils, herbaceous perennial vegetation such as turf grass and garden plants, and trees in rural settlements, homestead gardens and urban areas. In particular, land take of agricultural land for the settlements often impacts the function of the soil as regards food provision. Such changes of land use are often a precursor to some other aspects of land take, in particular to soil sealing, and it is important to monitor such changes in order to anticipate at least part of the process of soil sealing. It is also important to note that settlements are not always fully sealed. On the contrary, a significant number of urban areas still have large amounts of soils that are not sealed, and for some urban areas that amount is more than 50 % of their surface. That indicator related to that aspect of land take alone is therefore not sufficient to fully monitor the issue of land take as a whole, as it does not differentiate between sealed soils and unsealed soils, and it renders the green areas within settlement areas invisible, making their monitoring and sustainable management more difficult.