AbstractGlobalization increasingly allows countries to externalize the environmental costs of land use, including biodiversity loss1. So far, we have a very incomplete understanding of how countries cause biodiversity loss outside their own borders through their demand for agricultural and forestry products grown in other countries2. Here we quantify the global range losses to forest vertebrates from 2001 to 2015 caused by deforestation attributable to 24 developed countries by means of their consumption of products obtained through global supply chains. We show that these driver countries are responsible for much greater cumulative range loss to species outside their own borders than within them. These international impacts were concentrated geographically, allowing us to map global hotspots of outsourced losses of biodiversity. Countries had the greatest external impacts on species occurring in nearby regions. However, in a few cases, developed countries also inflicted disproportionate harm on vertebrates in distant countries.
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Fig. 1: Consumers drive distant biodiversity loss through global agricultural and forestry supply chains.Fig. 2: International and domestic contributions to global forest biodiversity loss.Fig. 3: Hotspots of attributable biodiversity loss by country.Fig. 4: Impacts to species decline with distance from a driver country.
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Data availability
Data on forest cover and forest loss from the Hansen Global Forest Change v.1.7 (2000–2019) dataset are available in an online repository at https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest/download_v1.7.html (ref. 17). Land-use attribution data are available from the authors of ref. 20 on request. Those data were calculated using data from the MRIO database (https://worldmrio.com), the previously mentioned forest cover and loss data, FAOSTAT (https://www.fao.org/faostat) and EliScholar (https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_fes_data), all of which are publicly available. Range map data are available at the following online repositories: BirdLife International (http://datazone.birdlife.org/species/requestdis) and IUCN (https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/spatial-data-download). Processed species-level data are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14030743)77.
Code availability
The code necessary to replicate the analysis and figures can be found in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/AlexWiebe/Outsourced-Biodiversity-Loss.
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PubMed Google ScholarContributionsR.A.W. conceived of the study and R.A.W. and D.S.W. developed the methodology. R.A.W. conducted the data analysis and wrote the initial draft, with both authors contributing to subsequent revisions.Corresponding authorCorrespondence to
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Additional informationPublisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.Extended data figures and tablesExtended Data Fig. 1 Cumulative absolute habitat loss attributable to each driver country.Values shown are the cumulative contributions of each driver country to habitat loss of forest-obligate vertebrates (km2), separated by outsourced (red) and domestic (blue) components.Extended Data Fig. 2 Cumulative domestic and outsourced range loss, shown together for direct comparison.Values shown are total contributions of driver countries to habitat loss of forest-obligate vertebrates (units of species range equivalents), separated by domestic (blue) and outsourced (red) components. All countries have nonzero domestic losses except for Saudi Arabia, but those losses are very small in some countries and not visible in this figure.Extended Data Fig. 3 Magnitude of international impacts relative to domestic impacts.Values shown are the natural logarithm of the ratio of cumulative international to domestic range loss attributable to driver countries.Extended Data Fig. 4 Median contributions to range loss across all individual species.Values shown are the median contributions to species’ range loss of each driver country, as a percentage of the total range loss of those species, internationally (red) and domestically (blue).Extended Data Fig. 5 Hotspots of attributable biodiversity loss by country (alphabetical order: Argentina - India).Maps of the distribution of forest vertebrate biodiversity loss attributable via consumption-driven deforestation to 24 driver countries. Pixel values are the sum of species present in that pixel, weighted by the proportion of their ranges lost and attributable to a given driver country (units of species range equivalents). Credit: Made with Natural Earth (https://www.naturalearthdata.com).Extended Data Fig. 6 Hotspots of attributable biodiversity loss by country (alphabetical order: Indonesia - Saudi Arabia).Maps of the distribution of forest vertebrate biodiversity loss attributable via consumption-driven deforestation to 24 driver countries. Pixel values are the sum of species present in that pixel, weighted by the proportion of their ranges lost and attributable to a given driver country (units of species range equivalents). Credit: Made with Natural Earth (https://www.naturalearthdata.com).Extended Data Fig. 7 Hotspots of attributable biodiversity loss by country (alphabetical order: Singapore - United States of America).Maps of the distribution of forest vertebrate biodiversity loss attributable via consumption-driven deforestation to 24 driver countries. Pixel values are the sum of species present in that pixel, weighted by the proportion of their ranges lost and attributable to a given driver country (units of species range equivalents). Credit: Made with Natural Earth (https://www.naturalearthdata.com).Extended Data Fig. 8 Global hotspots of long-distance biodiversity loss attributable to all driver countries combined.Species-country data are included if the magnitude of attributable range loss exceeds the predicted values given the distance between that species’ range and the driver country. Thus, this map reflects the global distribution of exceptionally strong impacts of countries given their distance to species. Credit: Made with Natural Earth (https://www.naturalearthdata.com).Extended Data Fig. 9 Distribution of outsourced impacts to Critically Endangered species.The distribution shows frequencies of species-specific values of range loss attributable to the combined international effects of all driver countries, for all Critically Endangered species.Supplementary informationSupplementary InformationMethods and discussion of a sensitivity analysis, testing the sensitivity of our primary results to potential errors in forest cover data by comparing them with those calculated using an alternative dataset.Reporting SummaryRights and permissionsSpringer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.Reprints and permissionsAbout this articleCite this articleWiebe, R.A., Wilcove, D.S. Global biodiversity loss from outsourced deforestation.
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