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Abstract. Agriculturally-driven habitat degradation and destruction is the biggest threat to global biodiversity, yet the impacts on extinctions of different types of food and where they are produced and the mitigation potential of different interventions remain poorly quantified. Here we link the LIFE biodiversity metric: a high-resolution global layer describing the marginal impact of land-use on extinctions of ~30K vertebrate species with food consumption and production data and provenance modelling. Using an opportunity-cost framing we discover that the impact of what we eat on species extinctions varies widely both across and within foods, in many cases by more than an order of magnitude. Despite marked differences in per-capita impacts across countries, there are consistent patterns that could be leveraged for mitigating harm to biodiversity. We anticipate the approach and results outlined here could inform decision-making across many levels, from national policies to individual dietary choices.
Authors. Thomas Ball, Michael Dales, Alison Eyres, Jonathan Green, Anil Madhavapeddy, David Williams and Andrew Balmford
See Also. This publication was part of the Mapping LIFE on Earth project.
News Updates
» Notes on the Deepmind/Royal Society AI for Science meeting.» Attended Royal Society meeting on ecological/commercial risks.» New project on building species models of the whole planet.» Chaired session at ACM COMPASS 2024 and attended CoRE stack RIC.» Submitted preprint on quantifying the biodiversity cost of global food consumption for peer review.