According to the European Environment Agency, artificial surfaces continue to expand across Europe at a faster rate than the population is growing. This trend is especially pronounced in the Baltic states where land development is progressing significantly faster than the OECD average. Researchers say the situation points to worsening inefficiency in land use. "Ultimately, the taxpayer ends up footing the bill — there's really no alternative," said Evelin Jürgenson, professor of real estate and land management at the Estonian University of Life Sciences.

Additional tax revenue is primarily spent on the social and technical infrastructure demanded by new development areas. At the same time, Jürgenson noted that municipalities in Harju County have already come to realize that luring new residents into greenfield developments may no longer be economically viable. "Viimsi was one of the first to conclude that attracting more people wasn't worth it anymore because the cost of building new kindergartens and schools far outweighs the benefit," the professor explained.

Kärt Metsoja, a junior researcher in geodesy at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, added that the issue is particularly acute in smaller municipalities that are not regional centers of attraction. "New buildings are going up everywhere, even in places where the population is shrinking. Apartment buildings in town centers may be emptying out, yet new construction is still happening in parallel," she said.

The statistical indicator — hard-surfaced area per capita — can also increase even if no new surface is added, simply because municipalities with declining populations often lack the resources or capacity to demolish abandoned Soviet-era buildings or rehabilitate former industrial sites.

A study published this year by Metsoja and Jürgenson found that from 2018 to 2021, soil sealing increased in nearly all municipalities in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, regardless of whether the local population was growing or shrinking.

Idealistic dream

Evelin Jürgenson noted that, for a long time, the changes reflected in Estonia's land use data were driven by an idealistic dream. "It's almost an obsession among Estonians: the idea of moving out to a field somewhere and enjoying life there. But we see over time that life in a field isn't so idyllic after all. The birdsong disappears, a farmer spreads manure next door, which people don't like, and there's no bus service, no way to get around. Eventually, people start drifting back to the city," the professor explained.

Kärt Metsoja added that the issue is also one of values: "You might not see your neighbor's house, but you'll see their chimney smoke. If we keep repeating the narrative that this is the ideal Estonian lifestyle, we're normalizing land waste, not land conservation."

Unlike Germany or France, which have national targets to reduce land take, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania lack any clear policy in this area.

Since 2011, the European Union has recommended a goal of "no net land take by 2050." That means new land may only be developed if an equivalent amount of already damaged or paved-over land is restored to natural or agricultural use. Estonia has yet to implement this principle in any binding legislation.

The Planning Act does not prohibit building on agricultural land and local governments enjoy broad autonomy in land use decisions. On the one hand, Estonia's flexible planning system has helped the country develop quickly. But on the other, this same flexibility allows detailed plans to gradually undermine the broader goals set in comprehensive plans. "Maybe we've ended up with exactly what we wanted. We needed to move fast, EU funds were available and we had to make use of them," said Jürgenson.

She offered a comparison with Germany where professors often express surprise at Estonia's approach. "Planning is supposed to set the direction you're heading, but in your case, you set a direction only to cancel it from below," Jürgenson paraphrased. While she acknowledged that such flexibility can be beneficial, she also warned that it may now be too costly for Estonia as a whole.

Metsoja pointed to Pärnu as an example, noting that even comprehensive plans can allow for major residential developments on greenfields. Individual detailed plans that amend these broader documents further accelerate the trend.

Under Pärnu's comprehensive plan, 218 hectares of natural land were designated for development. Additional amendments through detailed planning added another 24 hectares. In total, 65 percent of the detailed plans adopted in the Pärnu area between 2015 and 2022 involved natural areas.

"We've seen that virtually every municipality is overplanning. Given current population trends, it's simply not credible that all the planned residential areas will actually attract enough people to fill them," Metsoja added.

The analysis by Jürgenson and Metsoja also highlighted a quieter but increasingly significant trend. While residential construction was indeed the main driver of land use change in the 1990s and early 2000s, the picture has shifted in recent decades. Between 2000 and 2006, residential buildings and mineral extraction (quarries) occupied roughly equal amounts of land. But from 2012 to 2018, quarries alone accounted for about 225 hectares of land use annually. During the same period, all other categories combined, including housing, industry and commercial areas, totaled just 244 hectares.

The researchers explain this as a vicious cycle set in motion by car-centric planning. Dispersed developments require residents to drive, which in turn demands more and wider roads. Road construction needs large quantities of fill material — gravel and sand — which leads to the opening of new quarries.

As a result, suburban sprawl is also destroying nature indirectly, far beyond the outskirts of towns and cities. While housing developments primarily consume farmland, quarrying operations increasingly expand into forests and semi-natural landscapes.

Zombie plans and lackluster supervision

Another significant but often overlooked flaw in Estonia's planning system is the issue of so-called "zombie plans" — detailed spatial plans that have no legal expiration date. As a result, decisions made years ago, such as during the previous economic boom, can be revived today even though environmental and social needs may have changed drastically.

To address this, researchers recommend introducing a fixed validity period for detailed plans. This would help prevent continued land fragmentation around cities based on outdated visions. It would also ensure that new developments align with current strategic goals.

At the same time, efforts to monitor these changes are hampered by the fact that pan-European tracking systems are poorly suited to Estonia's low population density. The European Environment Agency primarily monitors land use through the Urban Atlas (UA) dataset, which only covers larger urban areas — in Estonia, this means Tallinn and Tartu along with their surrounding counties and Narva within its city limits.

This leaves much of Estonia's suburban sprawl unaccounted for. For example, the city of Pärnu and its hinterland, where real estate development is active, are completely overlooked in EU monitoring systems because the population is below 50,000. "Estonia lacks a clear overview of land use. Before effective measures can be implemented, a monitoring system must be developed that fits local geographic and historical conditions," Jürgenson and Metsoja write.

With the implementation of the EU's new Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive, public and political attention has increasingly focused narrowly on soil sealing — covering soil with asphalt, concrete and the like — rather than addressing land take as a broader phenomenon. This approach could prove problematic for Estonia in two key ways.

First, it may cast shrinking rural areas in an unfairly negative light, since they contain large amounts of old infrastructure serving relatively few people. Second, it may overlook developments that do not completely cover the ground in concrete, such as sprawling suburban neighborhoods with lawns, but still destroy natural ecosystems and agricultural land.

Jürgenson and Metsoja conclude that Estonia urgently needs to develop its own national monitoring system and policy objectives that take local specificities into account. Blindly following European averages or doing nothing at all could lead to a future in which Estonia's landscape becomes fragmented and the cost of maintaining infrastructure overwhelms a shrinking taxpayer base.

The wonders of cooperation

Closer cooperation between neighboring municipalities could also help alleviate this burden. However, instead of planning infrastructure regionally and cost-effectively, Evelin Jürgenson believes that competition still tends to prevail. "Meanwhile, in the Nordic countries, there's already been long-standing discussion about how municipalities can work together in a win-win way," the professor added.

The reluctance of Estonian municipalities to collaborate is evident in practical and costly decisions. Jürgenson pointed to the example of Tartu and its surrounding rural municipalities. Rather than building a shared school or kindergarten at the border between two jurisdictions, each municipality builds its own. As long as the system incentivizes local governments to compete with one another, regionally intelligent planning will remain difficult to achieve.

Analyses by Metsoja, Jürgenson and their colleagues were published in the journals Land and Town Planning Review.

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