How Your Consumption Habits Impact Wildlife Thousands of Kilometers Away

Identifying hotspots of species threat has been a successful approach for setting conservation priorities. One important challenge in conservation is that, in many hotspots, export industries continue to drive overexploitation. Conservation measures must consider not just the point of impact, but also the consumer demand that ultimately drives resource use. To understand which species threat hotspots are driven by which consumers, we have developed a new approach to link a set of biodiversity footprint accounts to the hotspots of threatened species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The result is a map connecting consumption to spatially explicit hotspots driven by production on a global scale. Locating biodiversity threat hotspots driven by consumption of goods and services can help to connect conservationists, consumers, companies and governments in order to better target conservation actions.

Global species threat hotspots linked to consumption in United States
Darker areas indicate areas of threat hotspots driven by United States consumption, based on the mix of threats exerted in each country and the mix of export goods sent to the United States for final consumption. Terrestrial and marine species colour bars are on log scales showing units of total species-equivalents, which is the sum over all the fraction of species threats allocated to this consumer country

Moran and Kanemoto, nature.com

Global species threat hotspots linked to consumption in European Union

Moran and Kanemoto, nature.com

Global species threat hotspots linked to consumption in China

Moran and Kanemoto, nature.com

Global species threat hotspots linked to consumption in Japan

Moran and Kanemoto, nature.com

Via nature.com

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