This analysis finds biodiversity loss linked to CO2 emissions and land use in various countries, indicating urgent action is needed.
There is an increasing demand for consistent methods and tools to quantify biodiversity footprints: the magnitude of biodiversity loss associated with all direct and indirect impacts associated with a given human activity or economic actor. Here, we present the intactness-based biodiversity impact factors (IBIF) dataset: a consistent set of country-level impact factors that can be used to attribute losses in local terrestrial biodiversity intactness to emissions and resource use associated with production or consumption in a given country. We used the GLOBIO biodiversity model and its mean species abundance (MSA) metric to obtain these impact factors for 234 countries and five environmental pressures: CO 2 emissions, NH 3 emissions, NO x emissions, land use (urban land, cropland, pasture, forest plantations and mines) and roads. IBIF includes impact factors for vascular plants, warm-blooded vertebrates (birds & mammals) and both species groups combined. The dataset can be used to quantify the biodiversity footprints of current products, industrial sectors or consumers, in support of policy- and decision-making aimed at halting or reversing biodiversity loss.
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Schipper et al. (2025) studied this question.
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