Tracking biodiversity footprints embodied in the global supply chains of agricultural commodities: the examples of Germany and China

As the world's globalized economies become more and more interconnected, agricultural production and its associated environmental impacts are increasingly driven by consumption in geographically distant places. This is a challenge when it comes to building more sustainable modes of consumption and developing accounting principles of environmental impacts. In this study, we quantified the land-use driven biodiversity loss embodied in the food consumption, i.e. the biodiversity footprints of Germany and China, two major economies relying greatly on the trade of agricultural products. We developed a spatially explicit and product specific database which combines a recently updated countryside species-area relationship (cSAR) model at a resolution of 10 × 10 km with spatial information on global land use and crop production to estimate the impending vertebrate species loss at the level of single grid cells (landscape level) and potential global species extinctions (global level). These complementary indicators reflect different ecological processes that influence patterns of species diversity, acting at different scales. By integrating the indicators into a dataset in global food trade and consumption data, we show that, despite large quantities of imports, for China's biodiversity footprint occurs largely domestically. For Germany the footprint is mostly (landscape level) to almost entirely (global level) driven by imports. These differences reflect different supply chains and sourcing countries, but also point at differences in the global distribution of species richness, endemism and IUCN threat level. We found that few key commodities like cocoa, coffee, soybeans and products of livestock grazing contribute the most to the biodiversity footprints of both countries. Our results emphasize the need of multiple, complementary and spatial indicators of biodiversity impacts at landscape and global level to better track and quantify consumption-driven biodiversity loss across products, sourcing countries and taxa.