Resource footprints and their ecosystem consequences

Abstract

A meaningful environmental impact analysis should go beyond the accounting of pressures from resource use and actually assess how resource demand affects ecosystems. The various currently available footprints of nations report the environmental pressures e.g. water use or pollutant emissions, driven by consumption. However, there have been limited attempts to assess the environmental consequences of these pressures. Ultimately, consequences, not pressures, should guide environmental policymaking. The newly released LC-Impact method demonstrates progress on the path to providing this missing link. Here we present “ecosystem impact footprints” in terms of the consequences for biodiversity and assess the differences in impact footprint results from MRIO-based pressure footprints. The new perspective reveals major changes in the relative contribution of nations to global footprints. Wealthy countries have high pressure footprints in lower-income countries but their impact footprints often have their origin in higher-income countries. This shift in perspective provides a different insight on where to focus policy responses to preserve biodiversity.

EXIOBASE 3: Developing a Time Series of Detailed Environmentally Extended Multi‐Regional Input‐Output Tables

“…; Verones et al. ). Hence, there is a need for environmental accounting systems which enable the analysis of interrelations between global production and consumption processes.…”

“…In the past 15 years, however, liberalization of international trade, economic specialization, and the increasing importance of emerging economies led to a reorganization of supply chains at the global level. As a consequence, consumption in one country causes environmental impacts in multiple other countries in multifaced ways rendering territorial resource extraction and emissions monitoring insufficient for the evaluation of environmental impacts driven by final consumption (Davis et al 2011;Ivanova et al 2016;Tukker et al 2016;Verones et al 2017). Hence, there is a need for environmental accounting systems which enable the analysis of interrelations between global production and consumption processes.…”

A novel maximum entropy approach to hybrid monetary-physical supply-chain modelling and its application to biodiversity impacts of palm oil embodied in consumption

“…Global multi-regional input-output (MRIO) models provide a comprehensive mapping of the global supply chain network in monetary units and show how consumer demand in one country is linked to biodiversity loss in another (Lenzen et al 2012, Kitzes et al 2017, Moran and Kanemoto 2017, Verones et al 2017, Wilting et al 2017. However, the commodity details of MRIOs are too low to allow studying footprints of specific products such as different oil crops and vegetable oils (Wiedmann et al 2011).…”

Detecting unsustainable pressures exerted on biodiversity by a company. Application to the food portfolio of a retailer

“…Some authors have recently proposed combinations of these models, for instance combination of MRIO-based biodiversity footprint with GLOBIO Wilting and van Oorschot, 2017) and combination of MRIO models with LCA (Verones et al, 2017).…”