Impacts of global food supply on biodiversity via land use and climate change

Abstract Land-use change is currently the greatest driver of biodiversity change, with climate change predicted to match or surpass its impacts by mid-century. The global food system is a key driver of both these anthropogenic pressures, thus the development of sustainable food systems will be critical to halting and reversing biodiversity loss. Previous studies of the biodiversity footprint of food tend to focus on land use alone. We use the multi-regional input-output model EXIOBASE to estimate the impacts of biodiversity embedded within the global food system. We build on prior analyses, calculating the impacts of both agricultural land-use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission footprints for the same two metrics of biodiversity: local species richness and rarity-weighted species richness. Our biodiversity models capture regional variation in the sensitivity of biodiversity both to land-use differences and to climate change. We find that the footprint of land area does not capture the biodiversity impact embedded within trade that is provided by our metric of land-driven species richness change, and that our metric of rarity-weighted richness places a greater emphasis on the biodiversity costs in Central and South America. We find that methane emissions are responsible for 70% of the overall GHG-driven biodiversity footprint and that, in several regions, emissions from a single year’s food production cause biodiversity loss equivalent to 2% or more of that region’s total historic land use. The measures we present are simple to calculate and could be incorporated into decision making and environmental impact assessments by governments and businesses.