From the savannah to the supermarket — new study links consumption to biodiversity impacts in the Cerrado
When Stockholm Environment Institute, one of the two lead organizations behind Trase, launched its research initiative on Producer to Consumer Sustainability (P2CS) in 2015, a key challenge was to explore the interface of sustainable consumption and sustainable production agendas in the era of globalized trade.
These agendas tend to operate in isolation, particularly when it comes to agricultural commodities and consumer goods. Consumption choices are informed by generalized statistics — such as that producing one kilo of cotton uses 10,000 litres of water, on a global average — lacking contextual detail, punctuated by headline-grabbing one-off stories of pollution and labour exploitation in some far-distant city.
At the same time, producers have little way of knowing how to reach consumers or investors who might be willing to subsidize investments in more sustainable farming and processing technologies.
Between the two lies a black box of complex, endlessly branching global supply chains.
Making connections
A new paper, “Linking global drivers of agricultural trade to on-the-ground impacts on biodiversity”, represents the latest effort to make the links between consumers and producers — and sustainability impacts — of agricultural commodities more transparent. It applies a new data-driven approach to quantify how consumption of different categories of products in different markets is linked to threats to biodiversity in the Brazilian Cerrado due to the expansion of soy farming.
The Cerrado is an eco-region comprising more than 2 million square kilometres of tropical savannah. Although it hosts an estimated 5% of the world’s species, it is often overshadowed by the Amazon in sustainability discourse. The Cerrado is a major frontier of soy expansion, and habitats for many rare species are rapidly being lost.
“Our new method reveals specific links between consumer countries, traders, soy production and habitat loss,” said Jonathan Green of SEI York, the paper’s lead author. “This kind of knowledge can be invaluable for helping companies and countries to source more sustainably and invest in less ecologically harmful agriculture.”
Data integration
The study connects Trase data to another major strand of consumption-based accounting work at SEI. The Trase data maps the part of the soy supply chain: from production localities in the Brazilian Cerrado to the point of export (or to the domestic market). From this point the IOTA model developed at SEI takes over, using multiregional input-output (MRIO) economic data to model how the soy then flows through the global economy — all the way to the final consumer.
A major benefit of this integration is that it maps soy flows through several stages of processing and re-export. It even follows soy “embedded”, but not physically present, in products such as meat, dairy or leather from livestock fed on soy.
Finally, the team cross-referenced the geographic data on soy expansion with the habitat ranges of more than 400 plant and animal species that are highly or exclusively dependent on Cerrado ecosystems (i.e. had at least 70% of the entire range within the Cerrado), as well as a handful of more “charismatic” non-endemic species, such as the Giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla).
The study found that 86% of the losses to the Giant anteater’s range in the Cerrado occurred in Mato Grosso state, driven particularly by consumption of soy-fed meat products in Brazil, China and the EU. However, species even more dependent on the Cerrado, such as Kaempfer’s woodpecker and the blue-eyed ground dove, are in an even more precarious situation.
According to Trase Director Toby Gardner, one of the study’s co-authors: “These results show that it is possible to use existing datasets to see through the tangled web of global commerce, giving us the detailed information, we need to devise solutions. We hope this methodology will be extended to other agricultural commodities and ecosystems in the near future.”
