Linking global drivers of agricultural trade to on-the-ground impacts on biodiversity

Abstract

Consumption of globally traded agricultural commodities like soy and palm oil is one of the primary causes of deforestation and biodiversity loss in some of the world’s most species-rich ecosystems. However, the complexity of global supply chains has confounded efforts to reduce impacts. Companies and governments with sustainability commitments struggle to understand their own sourcing patterns, while the activities of more unscrupulous actors are conveniently masked by the opacity of global trade. We combine state-of-the-art material flow, economic trade, and biodiversity impact models to produce an innovative approach for understanding the impacts of trade on biodiversity loss and the roles of remote markets and actors. We do this for the production of soy in the Brazilian Cerrado, home to more than 5% of the world´s species. Distinct sourcing patterns of consumer countries and trading companies result in substantially different impacts on endemic species. Connections between individual buyers and specific hot spots explain the disproportionate impacts of some actors on endemic species and individual threatened species, such as the particular impact of European Union consumers on the recent habitat losses for the iconic giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla). In making these linkages explicit, our approach enables commodity buyers and investors to target their efforts much more closely to improve the sustainability of their supply chains in their sourcing regions while also transforming our ability to monitor the impact of such commitments over time.

Climate adaptation by crop migration

“…Expanding agriculture into new areas is extremely environmentally damaging, decreasing carbon storage, harming water quality, reducing wildlife habitat, and biodiversity [49][50][51][52] . For example, the expansion of soybean production in South America has had damaging consequences for the highly biodiverse Cerrado biome 53 . The majority of harvested-area changes in our dataset appear to result from crop switching ( Supplementary Fig.…”

Cropland Footprints of Australian Dietary Choices

“…Results obtained after impact assessment often differ greatly from results obtained prior to impact assessment [30,40], leading to different study conclusions. For example, several studies have noted that the biodiversity impacts of palm oil are disproportionately high relative to land area occupied [30,68,69]. Indeed, there is reason to question the fitness-for-purpose of sustainable diet studies that use "land area" as an indicator of environmental sustainability as "land area" does not reliably address relevant environmental concerns like cropland scarcity, biodiversity loss or malnutrition [27].…”

A practical approach to measuring the biodiversity impacts of land conversion

“…The absence of this information limits the ability of the metric to be adapted to different spatial scales (Veach, Di Minin, Pouzols, & Moilanen, 2017). This is required to assess drivers of biodiversity loss as it demonstrates the linkages between changes in the state of biodiversity and specific human activities (Green et al, 2019).…”