The Environment Strategy for Scotland: Delivering the Environment Strategy Outcome on Scotland's Global Footprint - Evidence Base & Policy Levers

9. Appendix C: Linking consumption with other environmental impacts

This Appendix complements the section on ‘Linking consumption with other environmental impacts’ in 4.6 (page 33), by providing further information on relevant datasets, additional considerations and unknowns for each of the environmental impacts considered in that section: biodiversity loss, deforestation and water use.

9.1.1 Biodiversity loss

Relevant datasets:

• Since all biodiversity-loss drivers are correlated or strongly correlated with the size of the human metabolism, the CLUM is a useful starting point for identifying priority areas. This points to the food subcomponent of the Ecological Footprint, particularly the cropland, pasture and forest products Footprint associated with food consumption.
• MRIO-based data for the United Kingdom is available through the Global environmental impacts of consumption database model. This calculator quantifies associated tropical deforestation, predicted species loss and demand on species-richness weighted area for products consumed in the UK.
• Country scale, MRIO-based studies have quantified and linked consumption to biodiversity-relevant metrics (Lenzen et al., 2012; Kitzes et al., 2016; Marques et al., 2017; Wilting et al., 2017; Chaudhary and Brooks, 2019; Marquardt et al., 2019).

Additional considerations and unknowns:

• Biodiversity type bias: current knowledge on biodiversity is strongly biased towards vertebrate species, while invertebrate, plant, and other types of biodiversity are not well studied.
• Location bias: studies and data availability are biased towards more studied areas, including tropical rainforest, while African countries are less studied.
• Observation bias: direct competition for habitat leading to biodiversity loss, as in the case of plantations versus virgin forests, can be observed directly. More diffuse threats, such as invasive species, pollution or climate change, or growing demand, are harder to observe, even though their impact may lead to more biodiversity loss.

Potential synergies:

• Drivers of biodiversity loss strongly overlap with drivers of deforestation.
• Changing impacts over time: future impacts of climate change will likely be greater. Also, invasive species grow their impact over time.
• A key requirement for policy and action to effectively address global biodiversity loss is an approach that targets all the major drivers and their interactions, as opposed to single specific targets (Jaureguiberry et al., 2022)

9.1.2 Deforestation

Relevant datasets and linkages:

• This report: total demand for forest and agricultural products are linked here by type of consumption, land-use and location of supply chain origin.
• Data available for the UK on tropical deforestation for the UK can be found in the Global environmental impacts of consumption database.
• Data on deforestation risk embodied in production and consumption of agricultural and forestry commodities for the UK, for 2005-2018, is available here https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5886600.
• Global Forest Watch provides overviews on forests by country. Primarily geospatial data by country, it also includes time series of tree cover gain and loss.

Additional considerations and unknowns:

• While the drivers are well known, 75% of deforestation is driven by domestic demand, suggesting that the promotion of deforestation-free supply chains are inherently limited in the degree of deforestation that can be prevented.
• Data wise, satellite, MRIO and combined analyses have numerous limitations in terms of nature and magnitude of deforestation/degradation and resolution in determining specific drivers of identified deforestation.
• The UK and other high-income countries have experienced net forest gain. At the same time, their external demand adds to the pressure on tropical forests. Biodiversity preservation in the UK is therefore accompanied by biodiversity loss in other countries.

Potential synergies:

• Drivers of deforestation strongly overlap with drivers of biodiversity loss. Deforestation is also a major source of anthropogenic GHG emissions, and there may be opportunities to couple avoiding deforestation with driving the carbon transition.

9.1.3 Water use

Relevant datasets and linkages:

• UK (but not Scotland) specific data is available in the Global environmental impacts of consumption database. This database distinguishes how UK consumption depends on green water, blue water and scarcity-weighted blue water.

Additional considerations and unknowns:

• Virtual water considerations, underlying the water Footprint concept, help identify to what extent a population depends on water from elsewhere. This aligns with the research question posed here – understanding environmental impacts overseas. The water Footprint does not show to what extent water demands operate within available budgets, or whether they are also part of damaging overuse. If the main concern is to avoid putting resource demands on ecosystems abroad, then water Footprint assessments do point to potential areas that do depend on foreign resources. If the concern is about resource uses that are depleting ecosystems, then water use would need to be analysed in the context of availabilities in those regions. By linking it to other competing demands for biocapacity, then that water use could also be compared more directly to other environmental pressures.