Quantifying the impact of the food we eat on species extinctions / May 2024
Submitted preprint on quantifying the biodiversity cost of global food consumption for peer review. This work links the LIFE biodiversity metric with food consumption and production data to quantify how different types of food and their production locations impact species extinctions. We discovered that the impact varies widely both across and within foods - in many cases by more than an order of magnitude. Using an opportunity-cost framing, we can estimate the marginal changes in expected extinctions from converting natural vegetation to agriculture or restoring farmland to natural habitat. Despite marked differences in per-capita impacts across countries, there are consistent patterns that could inform everything from national policies to individual dietary choices.