...Development of ecosystem or biodiversity accounts (to be applied in national environmental statistics)...The ‘threatened species index’ proved to generate useful outcomes at the more aggregated levels (e.g. country level or sector level). Its usefulness could be enhanced substantially by making the IUCN threat categories more detailed in the sense that (1) threats should be immediately linked to economic activities, and (2) the importance of the threat should be described... Please download the Report...

An extract from the Book:

...All applied methods have to rely on data and hence the quality of outcomes is largely determined by the availability and quality of such data. In this respect, throughout the literature review, the following main weaknesses were identified: 

• Lack of relevant environmental statistics, in particular ecosystem-related or even biodiversity-related accounts; this type of accounts is generally not available at the moment. Traditional environmental accounts such as water use, air quality or resource use are only very indirect indicators for ecosystem condition.
• Lack of a uniform categorization system for sectors and commodities at an international scale. Application of the Eora database has clearly demonstrated the importance of these weaknesses.
• Lack of a global standard for biodiversity footprint indicators and lack of insight into which indicators to apply for achieving reliable outcomes.
• Uneven coverage of commodities, with for instance mining activities receiving much less attention than biofuel production.

Possible ways of addressing weaknesses and closing gaps are the following:

• Development of a global ‘biodiversity footprint standard’. At this moment, land use change, embodied

deforestation and the threatened species index seem to be suitable (proxy-) indicators for measuring biodiversity impacts related to international trade of commodities. Combining these indicators or expanding the set of indicators with additional state- or pressure-related indicators will certainly enhance robustness of outcomes but requires more efforts. However this is a complex issue and requires specific research. The development of a global methodological standard with regard to metrics for measuring biodiversity and ecosystems services quality (including their degradation and improvement) would be very beneficial as it would facilitate measuring the real biodiversity damage in quantitative terms, which in turn would help enhancing the effectiveness of many policy instruments to tackle biodiversity loss.

• Development of ecosystem or biodiversity accounts (to be applied in national environmental statistics).
• The ‘threatened species index’ proved to generate useful outcomes at the more aggregated levels (e.g. country level or sector level). Its usefulness could be enhanced substantially by making the IUCN threat categories more detailed in the sense that (1) threats should be immediately linked to economic activities, and (2) the importance of the threat should be described.
• ...

Please download here below the Document: EU-Identification and mitigation of the negative impacts of EU demand for certain commodities on biodiversity in third countries - ENV.B.2/ETU/2012/0045r

Images credits

Image 1: Authors: ARCADIS: Johan Lammerant, Linde Vertriest, Richard Peters - MILIEU: Niall Lawlor, Guillermo Hernandez, Agnieszka Markowska, Ingmar Von Homeyer - KGM & Associates: Dan Moran

Image 2: Figure 21: An overview of PUMA’s E P&L results by region (A), business line (B), environmental impact (C) and PUMA operations (D) (source: Puma 2011).