Let’s Talk About Biodiversity
Most people now recognise that biodiversity is crucial, not just for endangered species but for entire ecosystems and, ultimately, for us and our food systems. However, there's still a lot of confusion about how our actions affect biodiversity, how to measure this impact, and how it compares to other environmental impact categories we're more familiar with.
Can Impact on Biodiversity be Quantified?
Quantifying the impact on biodiversity is challenging because various factors contribute in different ways. Unlike other environmental impact categories, such as global warming potential, where different gases can be compared to CO2 based on their radiation absorption and atmospheric persistence, biodiversity is influenced by a range of factors and manners. These include climate change, water deprivation, land transformation for agriculture or urban development, which affects species' habitats, and contamination by toxic substances.
In Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) terminology, biodiversity loss is considered an endpoint indicator rather than a midpoint indicator. For example, global warming potential is a midpoint indicator that measures greenhouse gas emissions linearly, while climate change is an endpoint indicator that considers complex feedback loops and interactions, making it harder to quantify. Similarly, determining the impact on biodiversity involves understanding the different and sometimes interdependent effects like that of water resource depletion, habitat conversion, and regional climate change.
In summary, measuring and comparing the impact on biodiversity from various sources is a complex challenge with no consensus in academia or industry yet. However, there are multiple approaches worth exploring to better understand and address this critical issue.
What Approaches Are Out There?
One methodology that proposes a biodiversity score is ReCiPe, which calculates a value for damages to species labelled as "Damage to Ecosystem." This score is composed of several midpoint indicators, including global warming, water use, freshwater ecotoxicity, freshwater eutrophication, tropospheric ozone (eco), terrestrial ecotoxicity, terrestrial acidification, land use/transformation, and marine ecotoxicity. Similarly, Eco-Indicator 99’s "Damage to Ecosystem Quality" measures biodiversity loss and informs its single score impact value, considering factors like land use, acidification, eutrophication, and ecotoxicity. LC-Impact's "Ecosystem Quality" category includes climate change, photochemical ozone formation, acidification, eutrophication, toxicity, land stress, and water stress.
These examples illustrate that there is no consensus on which impact categories should be included in a biodiversity impact assessment. However, the various approaches can still be useful for understanding the common midpoint categories generally considered when attempting to quantify biodiversity impacts. These categories should be examined when translating an LCA study to impacts on biodiversity.
Does PEF Evaluate Impacts on Biodiversity?
As we have explained in a previous blog, PEF (Product Environmental Footprint) is our primary methodology. Given the importance of biodiversity, it's essential to know that PEF evaluates a product’s impact on biodiversity effectively. While PEF does not group midpoint indicators into a specific biodiversity indicator, it still provides valuable insights into biodiversity impacts due to its holistic approach. PEF assesses environmental impacts broadly, covering the impact categories generally used to rate biodiversity impact, along with others like human health and resource depletion.
To understand biodiversity impact with PEF, the following PEF impact categories are crucial and available in your Sustained Impact workspace: climate change, acidification, eutrophication (terrestrial, freshwater, marine), land use, ecotoxicity, and water use. These categories ensure an understanding of a product’s impact on biodiversity within the PEF framework.
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In conclusion, understanding and quantifying the impact on biodiversity is a complex challenge due to the variety of contributing factors. Various methodologies, including ReCiPe, Eco-Indicator 99, LC-Impact, and PEF, offer different approaches to assess these impacts. While there is not yet consensus on the specific impact categories to include, these methods provide valuable frameworks for evaluating biodiversity. PEF, in particular, offers a comprehensive assessment of environmental impacts, including key categories relevant to biodiversity. By focusing on these categories, we can gain better insights into how products affect biodiversity and make more informed decisions to protect our ecosystems.
At Sustained, we are committed to staying ahead of industry developments. We monitor how the industry is evolving, and when a consensus is reached, we will implement relevant methodology updates. This ensures that our tools and assessments remain at the forefront of scientific and industry standards, helping businesses make the most informed and impactful decisions for biodiversity protection.
