How does Swedish food production affect biodiversity? Development of assessment methods at product level.

Environmental product footprinting of food based on life cycle assessment is widely used in decision making, but the environmental aspects included are often limited to the climate impact. This is too narrow a perspective and risks steering in the wrong direction - more aspects need to be included.

As agriculture is a main driver of biodiversity loss, neglecting to include biodiversity as an impact category for food is especially problematic.

Available methods to include impacts on biodiversity in LCA are less advanced than those used to assess the climate impact and more research in this area is urgently needed.

In this project, we will establish biodiversity characterisation factors for Sweden that consider species richness, functional diversity, landscape effects and different reference situations, and test these in case studies comparing organic and conventional crop production, and extensive and intensive beef production.

Large Swedish biodiversity datasets available from environmental monitoring systems,  peer-reviewed studies and yet unpublished data will be consolidated and used for this purpose.

The project thus aims at making biodiversity data useful in current decision making at policy, business and consumer level, and at advancing methods for doing so, hence contributing to generalisable scientific advances in the field.

This interdisciplinary project will be carried out by leading LCA experts and ecologists, working closely with a large stakeholder group.