Our research
We are developing a new, flexible method to estimate the impacts of specific foods on both greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity. Our measure of biodiversity impact is completely new, developed in Cambridge to quantify the combined risk of species going extinct because of where in the world different foods are produced.
The increasing availability of global-scale data on land-use, food production, food consumption, trade, and the distribution of life on Earth creates an unprecedented opportunity to carry out transparent, evidence-based analyses on these environmental impacts of food.
The LIFE metric
Global biodiversity is in crisis. Human activities are driving species to extinction 100-1000 times faster than the natural rate. By far the most prevalent threat to the majority of the world’s wild species is the loss and degradation of natural habitat, with around 75% of threatened or near-threatened terrestrial vertebrates facing increased extinction risk due to reductions in the size, quality, and connectivity of their habitats, driven largely by the expansion of agricultural land used to produce food.
The reason for this is twofold: an increase in the number of people to feed, but also an increase in the demand for foods that have a disproportionately greater impact. With the world’s population set to continue to grow well into the latter half of the 21st century, feeding people at least cost to other species is a significant challenge.
Despite the immediacy of the global threat to biodiversity, there has been little work to translate decision-making about food at the individual or policy level directly into species extinction risks. It is the goal of the Mandala project environmental team to address this shortcoming.
Work lead by Dr Alison Eyres and involving several Mandala team-members in the University of Cambridge Department of Zoology has seen the development of a method for assessing the impact of land-cover changes on species extinction risks: the Land-cover change Impacts on Future Extinctions (LIFE) metric (https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0327).
The LIFE metric draws together land-cover and species range data to estimate the marginal impacts of land-cover change on the extinction risks of ~30,000 terrestrial vertebrate species at a resolution of 1 arc-minute (approximately 3.4km2 at the equator). The LIFE metric allows users, for the first time, to directly assess the impacts of different land uses across the globe on species extinction risks.
Coupling it with spatially explicit crop and livestock production data enables Mandala researchers to investigate the impacts on extinction of almost all food products.
The biodiversity impacts of food in the United Kingdom
In a highly connected world, the market for food is increasingly global. This is particularly true for a country like the United Kingdom, which imports over 45% of the food it consumes, and whose demand for food uses roughly as much agricultural land overseas as on its own shores.
The provenance of food matters; biodiversity and greenhouse gas impacts vary dramatically with sourcing and production methods. To this end, Mandala researchers have developed a pipeline to estimate the impact of food at all scales, from individual dietary choices through to food-system intervention and national food policies.
Using national level food consumption, production, and trade data, work led by Dr Thomas Ball estimated the global distribution of the impacts of producing different foods, then used a multi-regional input-output modelling approach to estimate the provenance of food consumed in the United Kingdom, linking consumption to impact (10.33774/coe-2024-fl5fk).
The results of the work are striking, finding that the per-kg impacts of animal products, in particular those of beef and lamb, are often over 100 times higher than staple foods, and that the overseas impact of the food we eat outweighs its domestic footprint by roughly 20 to 1.
A large portion of this impact is driven by the consumption of beef and lamb imported from Australia and New Zealand, as well as the consumption of tropical products such as coffee, tea, cocoa, bananas, and other imported fruits.
These results underscore the need for careful decision making around the provision of food in the United Kingdom, especially around the prevalence of ruminant meat and the seasonality of produce.
Applications in Mandala and future work
The flexibility of the consumption to impact pipeline means that it can be easily applied in a range of settings as data are generated by Mandala activities. We will use the pipeline to model the overall environmental impacts of food consumption in Birmingham as well as the outcomes of the many food system interventions being examined