New maps demonstrate environmental impact of supply chains
Maps demonstrating humanity’s “biodiversity footprint” have been developed by researchers in Norway and Japan. The maps, designed to help people visualise the environmental impact of global trade, link supply chains in 187 countries to 6,803 vulnerable or endangered species. Examining the 166 threats to each animal from human activity, the maps illustrate the journeys of products associated with that threat. Those areas with the largest footprint were the EU, Japan and the United States.The EU and US were shown as posing particularly significant threats to Southeast Asian marine life.

The things that people buy and consume can have deadly consequences for the planet’s wildlife. Now a series of maps show where it’s hurting the most.

Daniel Moran, an industrial ecologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and his colleague Keiichiro Kanemoto from Shinshu University in Japan, developed the maps for a paper published on Wednesday in Nature Ecology & Evolution to illustrate the impact of what they call a biodiversity footprint. Dr. Moran sees this idea as an early step toward creating tools that will allow nations to one day regulate biodiversity through trade, as some currently do with carbon.

People like stuff, but unsustainable sourcing of that stuff has been damaging to the planet’s biodiversity. In the last 500 years, around 1,000 animals that we know of have gone extinct, mainly because of habitat destruction. Estimates vary, but the rate of extinction today is somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times as high as it was when humans didn’t exist, scientists say.

To visualize the link between global trade and its environmental impact, the maps connect the supply chains of traded commodities in 187 countries with 6,803 animals classified as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and BirdLife International. It looked at the 166 threats stemming from human activity that affect each animal and tracked where commodities resulting from that activity eventually end up.