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| Consumption of globally traded agricultural commodities like soy
and palm oil is one of the primary causes of deforestation and
biodiversity loss in some of the world’s most species-rich ecosystems.
However, the complexity of global supply chains has confounded
efforts to reduce impacts. Companies and governments
with sustainability commitments struggle to understand their own
sourcing patterns,while the activities ofmore unscrupulous actors are
conveniently masked by the opacity of global trade. We combine
state-of-the-art material flow, economic trade, and biodiversity impact
models to produce an innovative approach for understanding
the impacts of trade on biodiversity loss and the roles of remote
markets and actors.We do this for the production of soy in the Brazilian
Cerrado, home to more than 5% of the world´s species. Distinct
sourcing patterns of consumer countries and trading companies result
in substantially different impacts on endemic species. Connections
between individual buyers and specific hot spots explain the disproportionate
impacts of some actors on endemic species and individual
threatened species, such as the particular impact of European Union
consumers on the recent habitat losses for the iconic giant anteater
(Myrmecophaga tridactyla). In making these linkages explicit, our approach
enables commodity buyers and investors to target their efforts
much more closely to improve the sustainability of their supply
chains in their sourcing regions while also transforming our ability to
monitor the impact of such commitments over time. | |
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