The motivation is stark. Biodiversity loss is driven by land and sea use change, direct exploitation of nature, climate change, pollution and invasive alien species, all of which stem from deeper root causes such as consumption patterns, trade and governance. Organizations sit at the heart of that system: direct emissions from roughly 9,000 companies accounted for more than 38 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2021, and the environmental impacts of nearly any organization ripple through international supply chains to every corner of the planet. Yet while carbon footprinting has matured into a routine corporate practice, biodiversity footprinting remains fragmented, with a patchwork of methods that are difficult to compare across regions and value chains.

The core problem the researchers set out to solve is one of perspective. Existing biodiversity indicators are typically regional, meaning they weigh a hectare of degraded land in Finland the same as a hectare in Brazil. The team illustrates the trap with a simple example. Suppose an organization converts 200 hectares in Finland where 25 percent of species abundance remains, and 100 hectares in Brazil where 50 percent remains. A regional metric based on Mean Species Abundance would score both impacts identically at 50 MSA-hectares. But when the same impacts are evaluated with a global metric, the Potentially Disappeared Fraction of Species from the LC-IMPACT database, the Brazilian footprint comes out roughly 42 times larger than the Finnish one, because Brazil hosts far more species found nowhere else on Earth.

That difference matters for decision-making. Regional indicators ignore the global distribution and vulnerability of species, so two organizations with identical regional footprints may have radically different true impacts on global species richness. For a multinational with supply chains spanning dozens of countries, regional metrics make it nearly impossible to prioritize where action would deliver the greatest benefit for global biodiversity. The researchers argue that because trade flows distribute biodiversity impacts worldwide, organizations need indicators that can identify, report and compare impacts across global value chains in a unified way.

The biodiversity equivalent builds on the global Potentially Disappeared Fraction of Species indicator by weighting ecosystem-specific footprints with the estimated number of plant and animal species in each realm. The formula multiplies the terrestrial footprint by 0.801, the freshwater footprint by 0.096 and the marine footprint by 0.102, reflecting the estimated share of the world’s species living in each ecosystem type. The result is a single number that estimates what fraction of the planet’s species are at risk of global extinction from a given activity. Because the values are tiny, they are reported with metric prefixes such as nano, pico or femto biodiversity equivalents, mirroring the way kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents become tonnes. Crucially, the metric captures the intuition that the same pressure causes less global harm in species-poor regions than in species-rich ones, while equal biodiversity equivalent values mean equal fractions of global species potentially lost, wherever they occur.

Turning the metric into a practical tool required a six-step methodology. First, an organization selects the activities to assess, with system boundaries essentially set by its financial accounts. Second, it quantifies the drivers of biodiversity loss, such as land use or greenhouse gas emissions, caused per unit of each activity, drawing on life cycle assessment and environmentally extended input-output analysis. Third, the location of each driver is traced using regionalized databases like ecoinvent and EXIOBASE, and spatially explicit biodiversity impact factors are calculated by combining the location matrix with LC-IMPACT data. Fourth, the organization’s activity data are harmonized with the LCA and input-output classifications. Fifth, ecosystem-specific footprints are calculated and merged into the biodiversity equivalent. The resulting global impact factors have been released as an open database so that other organizations, experts and researchers can apply the method without rebuilding it from scratch.

The sixth step is the most provocative: assembling a value-transforming financial-environmental impact statement. The researchers argue that environmental accounting today remains superficially integrated with financial reporting and is routinely ignored in management decisions, even though organizational decision-making is ultimately guided by financial accounts. Their solution is to give footprints a monetary cost that becomes visible in the income statement, for instance by financing offsets that match the calculated carbon and biodiversity footprints. Once footprints carry a price, they alter the financial value of the organization itself, forcing senior executives and investors to confront environmental damage in the same ledger where profits and losses live.

To test the framework, the team used the University of Jyväskylä as a living lab. The institution, with 14,600 degree students, 2,800 staff members and an annual turnover of 230 million euros, is comparable in scale to a large corporation. The results were revealing. The university’s carbon footprint fell 15 percent between 2019 and 2023, from 22,723 to 19,405 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents, as heat and electricity emissions declined. Yet its biodiversity footprint stayed essentially flat at 58 nano biodiversity equivalents, because a shift to biomass in energy production and rising purchases of items like IT equipment and food offset the gains. The finding underscores how carbon reductions alone can mask persistent biodiversity harm, and how a unified metric exposes trade-offs that separate reporting would hide.

The offsetting demonstration produced the study’s most striking numbers. Using the World Bank’s carbon price for the European Union, about 96 US dollars per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023, and a purpose-built biodiversity offsetting cost, the researchers calculated what it would cost the university to offset its 2023 footprint. If the cost were spread over 30 years like the depreciation of a large investment, offsetting in Finland would cost roughly 435.78 million euros annually, while the same global biodiversity offset completed in Brazil would cost around 0.60 million euros. The biodiversity equivalent, being location-independent in the way the carbon dioxide equivalent measures global warming potential, allows impacts distributed across the world to be offset anywhere, and the team is candid that this global offsetting idea is controversial and deliberately simplified for illustration.

The authors acknowledge the risks. Monetizing nature could legitimize further destruction, and carbon offsetting schemes have repeatedly failed to achieve additionality, a problem that plagues biodiversity offsetting as well. Offsetting in species-rich countries more cheaply than in species-poor ones raises uncomfortable questions about equity between the Global South and Global North, even as the researchers argue the method could help expose and mitigate the unsustainable appropriation of resources from the South. The biodiversity equivalent also cannot capture genetic, functional and ecosystem diversity, and it merges drivers that behave differently over time, since land use impacts do not accumulate the way greenhouse gas concentrations do. Still, the team believes the metric could let organizations benchmark themselves against global goals such as the Kunming-Montreal target of reducing extinction rates tenfold by 2050, and that value-transforming accounting, backed by regulation, taxation and mandatory offsetting, is essential to drive the transformative changes in production and consumption needed to halt biodiversity loss.

Subject of Research: Integrated carbon and biodiversity footprint accounting with a unified biodiversity equivalent metric

Article Title: Value-transforming financial, carbon and biodiversity footprint accounting

Article References: El Geneidy, S., Peura, M., Aumanen, V.-M., Baumeister, S., Helimo, U., Vainio, V., & Kotiaho, J. S. (2026). Value-transforming financial, carbon and biodiversity footprint accounting. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00151-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00151-8

Keywords: biodiversity footprint, biodiversity equivalent, carbon footprint, financial accounting, environmental accounting, life cycle assessment, EXIOBASE, LC-IMPACT, biodiversity offsetting, species extinction, corporate sustainability, industrial ecology

The research team, led by Harry C. Wilting of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency together with colleagues at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: which intermediary regions and sectors connect Dutch final demand to global biodiversity loss? To do so, they quantified the biodiversity footprint of Dutch consumption in 2015 at 16.1 million MSA-loss hectares per year, a unit based on Mean Species Abundance, or MSA. The MSA metric expresses local biodiversity intactness on a scale from 0 to 1, where 1 represents an undisturbed ecosystem with its full complement of naturally occurring species and 0 represents a site where all original species have vanished locally. Multiplying the area affected by the degree of intactness lost yields a measure of biodiversity damage that can be aggregated across the entire world economy.

What makes the study methodologically novel is the way it dissects that aggregate figure. Environmentally extended multi-regional input-output analysis, or EEMRIO, has long been the workhorse of consumption footprint studies. It links a matrix of economic transactions between 69 countries and regions and 48 sectors to environmental pressure data on greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen emissions and land use, then traces how final demand for goods and services propagates through the Leontief inverse of the input-output system to generate pressures everywhere in the world economy. Biodiversity impact factors derived from the GLOBIO 4 global biodiversity model then convert those pressures into MSA losses, covering habitat replacement, fragmentation, disturbance, climate change and nitrogen deposition. Previous studies had broken footprints down by region, sector and consumption category, but none had decomposed them by production layer.

Production layer decomposition builds on structural path analysis, a technique from the 1980s, but instead of identifying individual supply chain pathways one by one, it groups all pathways of the same length into layers. Layer 0 consists of the sectors that deliver products directly to final consumers. Layer 1 comprises the suppliers of those sectors, layer 2 the suppliers of the suppliers, and so on, theoretically to infinity. Mathematically, the decomposition exploits the Taylor expansion of the Leontief inverse, splitting the total footprint into contributions from each power of the input coefficient matrix. The researchers analysed layers until 98 percent of upstream losses were covered, ensuring that even distant tiers of the economy were captured rather than truncated.

The headline finding is a stark redistribution of responsibility. Direct pressures from Dutch consumers themselves, such as land occupied by their homes and greenhouse gases emitted by their cars and heating systems, account for just 12 percent of the total footprint. Production within the Netherlands for Dutch final demand contributes another 29 percent. The remaining 59 percent of biodiversity losses occur at upstream suppliers based abroad. And the losses do not stop at direct suppliers: layer 0 firms delivering straight to consumers cause 26 percent of the total, their own suppliers at layer 1 cause 24 percent, and layers 2 and beyond collectively account for a remarkable 38 percent. Even suppliers four steps removed from the consumer contribute more than 5 percent of the total, a tier of the economy that virtually no sustainability policy currently reaches.

Geographically, the picture is one of outsourced destruction. Roughly 41 percent of the losses stem from pressures occurring within the Netherlands itself, but producers in other European countries, including Russia, account for 23 percent, with 15 percent inside the European Union excluding the Netherlands. Outside Europe, Asia and Oceania contribute 15 percent, the Americas 13 percent and Africa 9 percent. The dominant pressure also shifts with geography: within the Netherlands, 81 percent of losses are driven by greenhouse gas emissions, whereas in nearly every other region land use dominates, reflecting the cropland, pasture and forestry embedded in imported feed, food and wood. Only in Asia, where energy production and manufacturing facilities emit heavily, do greenhouse gases slightly outweigh land-use impacts.

The sectoral breakdown points squarely at agriculture. The agriculture and fisheries sector alone generates 35 percent of total losses, aggregated across all countries, mostly through land occupation for cereals, oil seeds, other crops and grazing land for livestock. Forestry and construction follow, driven by land used to grow timber. In all other sectors, greenhouse gas emissions dominate, particularly electricity generation in the utility sector. Nitrogen losses arise mainly from ammonia emissions from agriculture and nitrogen oxides from transport, including international aviation and shipping. Notably, this study incorporates nitrogen emissions alongside climate and land pressures thanks to a new dataset of biodiversity impact factors, making the footprint more complete than earlier Dutch assessments.

Among consumption categories, housing and food loom largest, together responsible for 61 percent of the Dutch footprint, with housing at 32 percent and food at 29 percent, followed by transportation at 16 percent, services at 13 percent and goods at 11 percent. But the layer structure differs sharply between categories. Housing and transport generate large impacts close to the consumer: layers 0 through 2 account for 71 percent of transport impacts and 61 percent of housing impacts, reflecting fuel combustion, home heating, construction and building materials. Food and goods, by contrast, concentrate their damage further upstream. For food, more than one third of the footprint comes from land occupation in the rest of the world within layers 0 to 3, tied to raw agricultural materials that are processed closer to consumption. For goods, more than 55 percent of impacts occur at layer 2 or higher, embedded in the production of semi-finished products such as textiles and furniture components abroad.

The study also grapples with a thorny accounting question: how to weigh the future biodiversity damage of today’s greenhouse gas emissions. Because carbon dioxide warms the planet for decades to centuries, the researchers used a 100-year time horizon, consistent with IPCC convention, which makes climate-related pressures the single largest contributor at 56 percent of the footprint. A sensitivity analysis shows this share could range from 23 percent on a 20-year horizon to 84 percent on a 500-year horizon. The authors acknowledge limitations as well: the analysis covers terrestrial biodiversity only, excludes pressures such as eco-toxicological pollution, invasive species and overexploitation, and relies on impact factors assumed stable over short periods. Different biodiversity metrics, such as the Potentially Disappeared Fraction, can also yield different country rankings.

The policy implications are immediate and far-reaching. Because impacts cluster in different layers depending on the product, the researchers argue that effective biodiversity policy must be tailored per supply chain, combining national measures with transboundary instruments such as the EU deforestation-free products regulation and the carbon border adjustment mechanism. The findings feed directly into obligations under the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, and the authors stress that supply-chain responsibility must extend well beyond direct suppliers to become part of extended producer responsibility. For consumers, the message is equally clear: the energy used at home and the fuel in the tank carry the highest biodiversity cost per euro spent, but the deepest damage of the shopping basket lies hidden in the fields and factories of a global economy several layers removed from view.

Subject of Research: Production layer decomposition of the biodiversity footprint of Dutch consumption

Article Title: Unravelling biodiversity impacts of consumption: a production layer decomposition analysis for the Netherlands

Article References: Wilting, H. C., in‘t Veld, D., Marques, A., & van Oorschot, M. M. P. (2026). Unravelling biodiversity impacts of consumption: a production layer decomposition analysis for the Netherlands. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00171-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00171-4

Keywords: biodiversity footprint, Netherlands, production layer decomposition, input-output analysis, Mean Species Abundance, supply chains, land use, greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen emissions, consumption patterns, GLOBIO, policy