Paper 07 for the 6th UK Biodiversity Indicators Forum Meeting. 5-6 Dec., 2012.
Developing a ‘Global Impacts’ Biodiversity Indicator
Chris West, Elena Dawkins, Simon Croft
Stockholm Environment Institute, University of York
Background
The UK is becoming increasingly reliant on imported goods and services to satisfy consumer demand. This
growing demand, combined with recent and continued liberalisation of global trade, has resulted in a
complex network of supply chains that cause pressure on biodiversity and ecosystems (beyond the UK’s
borders). It is proposed that there is a need to produce a methodology for linking imports to geographicallydefined impacts on biodiversity in order to provide an indicator for the impact of consumption on overseas
biodiversity.
Over the last 12 months, the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York has been working on
initial actions to address this challenge within a project for Defra entitled ‘Measuring the impacts on global
biodiversity of goods and services imported into the UK’. The project links two distinct research streams: the
analysis of trade pathways and supply chains (both direct and indirect) for both goods and services to
identify important sources of production; and identification and analysis of production systems and products
and their impacts based on geographically specific biodiversity-relevant information. Combining these
research streams involves overcoming issues with data-availability (for trade, production, and biodiversity)
and assessment of complex resource pathways and environmental interactions.
Analysis of existing methods relevant to the link between consumption and biodiversity impacts has
highlighted that, for the products of agriculture in particular, there have been several studies in the UK and
abroad which have aimed to link the consumption of the goods to the regional overseas biodiversity
impacts. These studies apply a number of approaches for quantifying trade including material flow analysis,
trade statistics analysis, national country production and export data and techniques such as the calculation
of virtual land area use, input-output analysis and ecological footprinting. The variety of trade quantification
methods is matched by an equal variety in the biodiversity indicators used. Some have applied specific
indicators such as genetic diversity or relative species richness and others have linked trade data to broader
information on ecoregions or biogeographical realms. With such variation in methods and indicators across
existing studies, a key consideration when designing an indicator of global impact will be the selection of
appropriate biodiversity indicators and supporting datasets.
Methodological details
Within the Defra project, which is designed to link both the direct and indirect impacts of UK consumption,
we are applying an extended input-output methodology, combining data on financial trade flows and
complex global supply chains with country specific production data. This data is then linked to regionallyand sectorally-specific production data, involving harmonisation of datasets (from the Global Trade Analysis
Program (GTAP), and FAOStat, among others). The approach is then to attempt to quantify the impacts of
this consumption by linking production to drivers of biodiversity loss (such as land, water and fertiliser use)
and local information about resource scarcity, and habitat and biodiversity ‘quality’ that may affect
biodiversity impacts (see Figure 1 for an overview of our approach).
1
Paper 07 for the 6th UK Biodiversity Indicators Forum Meeting. 5-6 Dec., 2012.
Figure 1. Visual overview of methodology
One of the most crucial elements for tracking the biodiversity impacts of imported goods to the UK is
knowledge of the origin and raw material input of those goods. International trade datasets provide
components of this information to varying levels of detail and in a variety of forms. Some include vast
amounts of detail about the movement of specific products from one place to another, and include some,
but often limited information about the use of imported products within a country. For linking with
biodiversity impacts, this type of trade data may be most useful for those products which have undergone
minimal processing, such as some agricultural goods. It should be possible to explore the biodiversity
impacts associated with major producers or exporters to the UK and link this with the import data from
other sources in a similar way to which carbon emissions embodied in bilateral trade have been calculated in
the past.
However, bilateral trade analysis includes no detail of the indirect use of goods and services and therefore
has limited applicability for understanding impacts of end-user goods with complex international supply
chains; for products that have a number of processing stages in different locations the import and country
origin information recorded for these goods may be a number of stages removed from the potentially
greatest biodiversity impact along the supply chain of that product. A multi-directional trade model can be
used to map the full supply chains of goods used domestically; incorporating the impacts associated with
every processing stage of a good or service along its supply chain, domestically or internationally and
allocating this to the final consumer. Multi-regional input-output (MRIO) models can be constructed to
complete these calculations, enumerating global supply chains and calculating intermediate industrial
consumption endogenously. Whilst this is a very useful method for tracking supply chains and understanding
the impacts of consumption, it also has a number of limitations. The main limitation in terms of the trade
information is the necessity to aggregate to a relatively small number of products or industrial sectors in
order to map flows across large numbers of regions simultaneously. There is a general trade-off between
product level detail and number of world regions incorporated in these types of models. For example, the
GTAP database has 113 world regions, but only 57 product groups, whereas a two region input-output
model for a single country and the rest of the world might have over 200 product groups.
2
Paper 07 for the 6th UK Biodiversity Indicators Forum Meeting. 5-6 Dec., 2012.
Another limitation with current input-output models is that creating high-resolution timeseries from these
models is not straightforward: the length of time needed to harmonise data from multiple sources means
than datasets tend to be released only every 3-4 years or more; problems associated with the additions of
methodological regional and sectoral detail as new datasets becomes available may prevent easy
comparison; and supplier data may be (in some cases significantly) older than the advertised baseline.
In order to incorporate indirect flows with detailed regional and sectoral, our methodology looks to combine
financial input-output information with other available datasets, and in particular physical production
information. New methods have recently been developed to link available production (available, for
example, from FAOStat) to MRIO models. The recent EUREAPA project (see http://www.eureapa.net &
http://www.oneplaneteconomynetwork.org ) is one of the first examples to demonstrate how a high level of
detail in commodity classification can be maintained within an MRIO framework. A similar approach is used
within the Defra project to allocate product information (e.g. yield, land-use, inputs) to GTAP sectors: The
GTAP database includes bilateral trade and transport information for 129 regions and 57 sectors with trade
between both regions and sectors measured using financial flows. The FAOStat dataset provides production
and trade data for 245 countries for hundreds of primary products and many more processed goods, but
trade information is limited to inter-region trade (that is, country by country, rather than between regions
and industrial sectors as in GTAP). By combining datasets, it is possible to take the higher resolution data (in
terms of country and commodity numbers) of the FAO dataset and pair it with the higher resolution (in
terms of trade detail between industrial sectors) dataset of the GTAP database to construct a hybrid (see
Figure 2).
Figure 2. Combining monetary and physical trade and production data. Adapted from: Brad R. Ewing, Troy R. Hawkins, Thomas O.
Wiedmann, Alessandro Galli, A. Ertug Ercin, Jan Weinzettel, Kjartan Steen-Olsen, Integrating ecological and water footprint
accounting in a multi-regional input–output framework, Ecological Indicators, Volume 23, December 2012,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X12000714
For physical production data to be linked to effects on biodiversity an assessment must be made of the
spatially-explicit impacts that these production activities induce. This includes analysis of information on
3
Paper 07 for the 6th UK Biodiversity Indicators Forum Meeting. 5-6 Dec., 2012.
extraction rates, land-use change, and pollution resulting from production processes. These potential
impacts must be quantified (e.g. based on information on yield per area, average fertiliser application rates,
water use etc.) and, to assess likely biodiversity loss, must then be coupled to biodiversity indicator data at a
regional level (e.g. endemic or endangered species, rates of habitat change, protected areas, and sustainable
production indicators). For some indicators a quantitative link will be used to combine the biodiversity
indicator with production data, in other cases, where quantification is not possible, qualitative links must be
used.
We aim to use the methodology to provide an initial baseline dataset for UK import impacts on biodiversity.
This is intended for use beyond the end of this project for the further development of the subject area, as a
comparison with future data, and potentially for use in scenario analyses. The methodology and database
provided in this research will represent a key first step in enabling the UK to understand the impacts of its
imports on overseas biodiversity, an important requirement in fulfilling the UK’s commitment to EU and CBD
biodiversity targets. It is intended that as the methodology undergoes further development it will represent
an example of best practice in understanding the potential for the global impacts of a nation’s consumption,
with potential for utilisation internationally.
Potential limitations and data gaps
A key component of the final project report to Defra will highlight the limitations of the approach and
particularly the data gaps that exist that may initially prevent the method being used to provide the basis of
a holistic biodiversity indicator. In order to develop the methodology as an complete indicator it is proposed
that further work will be needed to:
1. Increase the number of production systems considered beyond the, mainly agricultural, production
systems that are included this proof-of-concept model. This requires assessment and incorporation
of new datasets.
2. Overcome limitations associated with gaps in the data (e.g. potential biases towards biodiversity
information in the tropics, lack of secondary processing information).
3. Undergo greater validation of the assumptions used in combining the trade datasets and seeking
supporting data/information where possible.
4. Explore options to create time-series with finer resolution.
5. Explore alternative trade datasets and methodologies (including the work of Manfred Lenzen’s
group: http://www.worldmrio.com ) and compare outputs.
6. Get feedback and refine methodology based on developments from stakeholders and researchers
working on related topics.
7. Make sure outputs from the methodology are relevant to policy discussions and commitments to
the CBD.
Discussions at the UK Biodiversity Indicators Forum
On the 6th December at the UK Biodiversity Indicators Forum, a working group will discuss the potential for
developing a ‘Global Impact’ Biodiversity Indicator. This workshop will begin with a 15 minute presentation
to provide an overview of the work conducted by SEI with Defra, and future development opportunities. This
will be followed by a discussion to address a number of the bulleted points above (especially points 2, 5, 6 &
7).
4