Development of a unique food biodiversity database

The link between climate impact and food production is well established.

For other environmental impacts and biodiversity in particular, there is almost no readily available information for food companies, buyers and consumers to aid decision making.The aim of this project is to quantify effects on biodiversity for a large number of food products, using available biodiversity life cycle impact methods and available biodiversity data and build a in a user-friendly food biodiversity database.

The focus is on food products consumed in Sweden, which includes food from Swedish agriculture but also imported food and food ingredients.

The aim is also to plan for how the database can continue to be updated and useful also after the end of the project, and investigate possibilities for scale-up to other sectors.The project will be led by the research institute RISE, in cooperation with the retail company Coop that will assist with data gathering and user trials of the database at the end of the project.We expect the database to be of very good use in for decision making by e.g. retail, wholesale, restaurants, public kitchens, food production industry.

Uses include: choosing food products and ingredients with low negative impacts on biodiversity, to find biodiversity hotspots in the production chain, identify synergies and trade-offs with other sustainability aspects, consumer information, etc.