Environmental assessment of land-use related biodiversity loss

In the short video here above, PhD student Francesca Rosa gives a brief overview of the project (if the video is not available in your region, please use external pagethis linkcall_made).

Many agricultural and forest commodities consumed in the industrialized world are produced in developing countries and emerging economies. Environmental impacts, such as biodiversity loss due to land-use change, do not occur only at the production phase but also along entire global supply chains. Decision-support tools such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can be used to assess the overall impact of a product's life cycle and thus achieve more sustainable consumption. LCA calculates inputs and outputs (i.e., resource use and emissions) along the life cycle of a product, from the extraction of raw materials to production, use, and finally disposal or recycling. In a second step, the environmental impacts of these inputs (e.g., on biodiversity) and emissions are modeled. In LCA, all environmentally relevant impacts of inputs and outputs should be assessed to give a comprehensive picture of potential trade-offs between different environmental impacts, for, example between climate change and biodiversity loss.
This research line aims to develop a global, spatially differentiated assessment method of land use impacts on biodiversity compatible with LCA. To assess the land use impacts, the difference in biodiversity (measured as changes in species abundance and richness) between a production system (e.g., arable land) and a reference situation (e.g., a semi-​natural ecosystem) within the same region is assessed. Even though much progress has been made recently, this methodology can still be improved.

Current project

Modelling the impacts of land use on biodiversity in the Life Cycle Assessment framework

PhD candidate: Francesca Rosa

This project is meant to close some of the gaps in the current methodology. In particular, it focuses on the impacts of different agricultural and forest management intensities and the effect of the landscape pattern, which need to be more comprehensively addressed. Furthermore, the project aims to implement a metric capable of encompassing more aspects of biodiversity, such as functional diversity, which is still lacking.

Collaboration

• external pageFulvio di Fulviocall_made, Researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria
• external pageLaura Scherercall_made, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, The Netherlands

Finished Projects

Doctoral Thesis of Laura de Baan

Doctoral thesis of Abhishek Chaudhary

These projects aimed to quantify region-specific impacts of various land use types on biodiversity (expressed as species richness) at the global scale. A meta-analysis of peer-reviewed publications was conducted to collect the pertaining data. If region-specific data was missing, impacts were approximated with average data across larger spatial scales (e.g. biomes). In addition, globally available data on species richness, endemism and ecosystem vulnerability were used to further account for region-specific differences.
This work was part of the interdisciplinary project myEcosystem - Assessing and Compensating the Ecosystem Impacts of Agricultural Products in the North-South Context, funded by ETH Zurich as a CHIRP (Collaborative, Highly Interdisciplinary Research) project.
Duration: 2009 - 2016