Quantifying Europe's biodiversity footprints and the role of urbanization and income

Maximilian Koslowski,Alexandre Tisserant,Daniel D. Moran,Francesca Verones,Richard Wood

doi:10.1017/sus.2019.23

Maximilian Koslowski, Alexandre Tisserant + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2019.23

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Abstract

Non-technical abstract Biodiversity footprinting links consumers to the biodiversity pressure their consumption induces, thereby informing choices and enabling participation in remediation measures. In order for countries, cities and households to reduce their impacts it is useful to know more precisely what the various drivers of their footprints are. Here we ask: do urban or rural areas in Europe exert higher biodiversity footprints? And how strongly coupled are income and biodiversity losses? Studying urban versus rural households at the country level in Europe, we found both have generally similar footprints, but that higher income households clearly drive higher footprints.

Highlights

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) estimates that more than 28,000 species are presently threatened with extinction (IUCN 2019)
life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) is commonly used within life cycle assessments (LCA) as a modelling step to convert physical resource demands into estimates of how impactful those pressures are on ecosystems
According to either impact methodology, the European biodiversity footprint associated with household final demand in 2010 was in total 2.8E-01 PDF or 4.6E+04 species.yr, and 5.7E-10 PDF or 9.1E-05 species.yr on the per capita level, respectively, from LC-IMPACT (PDF) and ReCiPe.i While a decline of the European average by about 10% and the European total by about 4% can be observed between 2005 and 2010, some countries show increased footprints in one or multiple impact categories, both on national average and per capita

Summary

Introduction

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) estimates that more than 28,000 species are presently threatened with extinction (IUCN 2019). While the production of goods like coffee or beef is a direct domestic driver for such environmental pressures, the demand for these goods often lies in other regions of the world (Lenzen et al 2012; Chaudhary & Kastner 2016; Moran & Kanemoto 2017; Verones et al 2017; Wilting et al 2017; Wiedmann & Lenzen 2018). Household consumption is an endpoint of global supply chains and can be considered to be a major driver of environmental burdens (Ivanova et al 2016). What shapes household consumption will have an impact on global biodiversity loss. As countries and the world as a whole become increasingly urban, it is important to understand how this urbanization process could lead to overall changes in the aforementioned composition of household demand. Semi-urban and rural households have similar consumption preferences? Semi-urban and rural households have similar consumption preferences? How much does urbanization alone, rather than changes in income or household

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