Biodiversity and biodiversity-loss are urgent topics in the climate-crises. And business activities have an impact here, but how to assess this impact? Traditionally, LCA’s have a hard time doing so. Since biodiversity is not included in the impact categories. Gabriel Mestres Sanna, master student Bio-Inspired Innovation at Universiteit Utrecht, wrote his thesis on how to combine LCA’s and biodiversity. He assessed the impact of one of our clients on this matter.
Can you tell us about your research?
So I wanted to do an internship on biodiversity and LCA and see how LCA's address biodiversity loss. Biodiversity is a very urgent topic, and I was asking myself: how can this be checked with a computer and with data? Then I came across LCA’s and decided to combine these two.
And with slowly getting into the LCA world, I saw that there were some problems regarding evaluating biodiversity loss with LCA’s. And this made me do my research into how a hybrid LCA methodology could solve one of the problems LCA have.
Because I noticed that LCA’s are not very complete in assessing biodiversity loss, since they barely include biodiversity in the assessed impact-categories. And that surprised me, since LCA’s consider environmental impact in a very broad spectrum. This “deficit” of LCA’s made me combine LCA’s with another methodology.
Biodiversity and biodiversity loss is very much contextualized in a geographical setting. An organisation producing a product will have a different “biodiversity score” when manufacturing here in the Netherlands, or in let’s say Brazil. With a hybrid LCA methodology I worked on solving this challenge.
Why is it so hard to assess biodiversity with LCA’s?
Biodiversity refers to all the variety of species that live on earth, to all the different species living in a specific ecosystem, or more generally to every living thing (UNEP, 2013). And there are five main drivers of biodiversity loss:
- Change in land & sea use
- Direct exploitation of organisms
- Climate change
- Pollution
- Invasive species
But few LCA methodologies are able to consider all of these, and mostly just take 3 out of the 5 drivers of biodiversity loss into account.
When assessing the biodiversity footprint, the fraction of species of the world that are at risk of extinction, LCA’s just consider species diversity and don't compare the results to a reference situation or contextualize this number to the geographical location.
Another challenge lies in the fact that LCA’s work based on functional units; the scope of your study. So for example, if you assess the impact of one house, the impact of 1,000 houses will not be multiplied by 1,000. It will be exponential.
The problem I focused on is the lack of spatial detail of LCA. LCA is a methodology that gives you an uncontextualized number, such as an amount of pollutant molecules that are released into the atmosphere and the soil, the CO2 emitted, the amount of land used, etc. And that is great to understand the environmental impact.
However, to understand the actual impact on biodiversity, you need to know how all this interacts with local ecosystems all over the world. In other words, it is not the same to use 5 hectares of land in the middle of the Amazonas or in the Netherlands (where there is mainly grass and not much biodiversity).
I focused on this problem, because from my point of view, if LCA could give insight on how biodiversity is affected around the world, it would be a great improvement in the methodology.
And what method did you use to assess biodiversity?
I used a recent paper to assess the biodiversity impact of one of Hedgehog’s clients, an organisation operating in the textile’s sector. This methodology originates from a Finnish university, in collaboration with private companies to further develop and commercialise it.
The good part of this paper is that the methodology let you form a map that shows the impact a company has on biodiversity. For example, the amount of water that the company consumes, the amount of CO2 that goes into the air and the biodiversity footprint of the company in every country in the world. Resulting in numbers, per country, concluding the amount of species that can disappear in a year because of the business activities.
The methodology combines two different methods: one being the standard LCA, and the other one being the Environmentally Extended Input-Output Analysis (EEIOA) (originated from before 2000). The combination of these two methodologies adds a certain level of uncertainty to the results. The outcome itself, the pure numbers or total value, is not very reliable. But the interesting part is it shows your impact around the world.
This insight of your impact is valuable. So for example, again, imagine a company that has a very big land use impact in Brazil, in the middle of the Amazonas. This company could then invest money in nature-restoration there as well.
Can you share some of your results?
For the client in my case study, we found the biggest biodiversity impact is here in the Netherlands. But what surprised me is that also the pollution was really negative in Uzbekistan, in Turkmenistan, and the United Arab Emirates. This is because in these countries, ecosystems get really harmed just with a very little amount of pollution. Because the ecosystems in these countries are so sensitive to this kind of stress.
Regarding the impact of the activities of this company, the ones with a higher biodiversity footprint were the ones related to travelling by airplane, the acquisition of vegetable oils to produce the textiles, and the different plastics used to create the textiles and for the daily use of the company. The airplane tickets and vegetable oils were together responsible for more than 85% of the biodiversity footprint.
And even when the amount of species you find with this methodology that will become extinct is very small, this does tell you about your environmental impact in more than 240 countries. And with this, adding the geographical context to your impact.
Can you tell more about this number, the biodiversity footprint?
The biodiversity equivalent (BDe) tells you the fraction of species that will go extinct, this is commonly known as biodiversity footprint. This tells you the species that would disappear in a whole year, due to your business activities. It's really, really small, but it's a number that you can compare. That's the good part.
Still, it sounds quite fatalistic, right? The amount of species that disappear because of your business activities. I mean, who would want to be responsible for that? Exactly, no one. But I think you need to be a bit fatalistic with climate change. Because in the long term, it is that fatalistic. I mean, species are getting endangered and disappeare. And it's not even that far from reality, probably.
The BDe makes biodiversity loss tangible and measurable. Just as the carbon footprint is a pretty straightforward way to understand your impact on climate change, the biodiversity footprint allows you to understand your impact on biodiversity. However, the down part of it is that it oversimplifies a very complex problem like biodiversity loss.
How was it for you to do this research?
So I'm happy with bringing the project to a good end, since it is the most complex project I've ever done. It was long and complex, I had to code, I had to check on the longest Excel I've ever used in my life. I learned a lot and gained useful insights in what LCA’s can bring.
I'm very happy to have done the internship; both because of the topic and because of Hedgehog Company. The mood, the energy that there is around the company, it's great. I think it's a young spirit, people are morally driven, people have goals in life, and it's a good team of professionals. This was my first working experience in a company, and I feel it was a very healthy environment to get started into working life.
What is your final advice or conclusion?
I am happy with the outcome, from the biology's point of view. And getting maps showing the impact of a company can be a great methodology to explain your impact on biodiversity for the public. However, I find the methodology not fully reliable yet, and it needs to be developed.
And when we want to add biodiversity to the impact assessment by LCA’s, we have to be aware and not make the process too complex, since that would discourage companies who want to assess their impact. Biodiversity is a complex topic, and it's a thin line with how in-depth you want to assess your impact, but still keeping it manageable for organisations in the sense of time-investment and workload.
LCA’s are a commercial tool, meant to help organisation in their sustainability journey. Maybe biodiversity doesn’t necessarily need to be assessed in the context of an LCA. Maybe there should be an own assessment method, just on the bare precision.
Sources
- UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme). (2013). What Is Biodiversity? What Is Biodiversity? https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226500829.001.0001
- Damiani, M., Sinkko, T., Caldeira, C., Tosches, D., Robuchon, M., & Sala, S. (2023a). Critical review of methods and models for biodiversity impact assessment and their applicability in the LCA context. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 101 (November 2022), 107134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2023.107134
- Geneidy, S. El, Baumeister, S., Peura, M., & Kotiaho, J. S. (2023). Value-transforming financial, carbon and biodiversity footprint accounting.
