High-resolution assessment of land use impacts on biodiversity in life cycle assessment using species habitat suitability models

Agricultural land use is a main driver of global biodiversity loss. The assessment of land use impacts in decision-support tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA) requires spatially explicit models, but existing approaches are either notspatially differentiated or modeled at very coarse scales (e.g., biomes or ecoregions). In this paper, we develop a high-resolution(900 m) assessment method for land use impacts on biodiversity based on habitat suitability models (HSM) of mammal species.This method considers potential land use effects on individual species, and impacts are weighted by the species’conservationstatus and global rarity. We illustrate the method using a case study of crop production in East Africa, but the underlying HSMsdeveloped by the Global Mammals Assessment are available globally. We calculate impacts of three major export crops andcompare the results to two previously developed methods (focusing on local and regional impacts, respectively) to assess therelevance of the methodological innovations proposed in this paper. The results highlight hotspots of product-related biodiversityimpacts that help characterize the links among agricultural production, consumption, and biodiversity loss.