In the majority of EU Member States, agricultural land is expected to decrease not only due to land-use changes in favour of urban expansion and afforestation but also to land abandonment processes. The knowledge on location and extent of agricultural land abandonment is relevant for estimating local external effects and adapting policy interventions. Currently, multi-level land-use models are able to capture determined processes of demand-driven redevelopment. However, land abandonment is much more difficult to capture because of its more ambiguous definition and the lack of data on its spatial distribution. This paper presents a method to explicitly model agricultural abandonment as a choice of disinvestment, which in turn is embedded in a utility-based land-use modelling framework that projects land-use changes for the EU and the UK. Validation exercises using observed spatial distribution of abandoned farmland show that the proposed method allows to model abandonment with acceptable accuracy.

在大多数欧盟成员国中，预计农业用地的减少不仅是由于土地用途的变化（有利于城市扩张和绿化），还有土地弃置过程。有关农用土地遗弃的位置和范围的知识与估计当地的外部影响和调整政策干预措施有关。当前，多级土地利用模型能够捕获需求驱动的重建的确定过程。但是，土地遗弃的定义更加含糊，而且缺乏有关其空间分布的数据，因此更难以捕获。本文提出了一种对农业遗弃作为投资选择进行显式建模的方法，该方法又嵌入基于公用事业的土地利用建模框架中，该框架为欧盟和英国的土地利用变化进行了预测。