Shared and environmentally just responsibility for global biodiversity loss

Human land use is the main driver of terrestrial biodiversity loss. It has been argued that producers and consumers have a shared responsibility for biodiversity loss because this land use is directly and indirectly driven by the local and global demand for products. Such responsibility sharing would be an important step for global biodiversity cooperation and conservation. Here, we use a global multiregional input-output framework to estimate consumption-based biodiversity loss, integrating with both the physical Food and Agriculture Biomass Input-Output (FABIO) dataset and a global monetary input-output table (EXIOBASE). We use an environmental justice framework for assigning biodiversity loss responsibility between producers and consumers. In this framework, we employ the Human Development Index (HDI) as a proxy of the weighting parameter for both producers and consumers. An environmental justice perspective may provide a fairer distribution of responsibility in a world where different nations have very different capabilities and see varying benefits from international trade. Environmentally just accounting increases the footprint of the Global North compared to other common approaches for sharing responsibility across all producers and consumers along international supply chains. We describe how environmental justice may inform cooperation in biodiversity protection between stakeholders along global supply chains.