Assessing the contribution of greenhouse gas emissions towards organisational biodiversity footprints

Charlotte Maddinson , Sami El Geneidy, Maiju Peura, Janne Kotiaho, Joseph W Bull

Organisations play a key role in addressing climate change and biodiversity loss, which are closely connected. Biodiversity footprinting has initially suggested that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions may contribute to a large proportion of many organisation’s biodiversity impacts. If true, mitigating GHG emissions could help organisations to tackle their climate and biodiversity liabilities in tandem. Consequently, there is a need for greater understanding of (i) how much GHG emissions contribute to biodiversity footprints, across economic sectors (ii) how reliable current footprinting methods are at estimating the impact of GHG emissions. On average, our results estimate that GHG emissions contribute to 47% of an economic sector’s total biodiversity footprint. This proportion is much higher than studies into observed biodiversity loss from climate change, which may be due to the methodological limitations of footprinting approaches. Overall, we find that biodiversity footprinting provides a useful but imperfect tool to interrogate the connections between climate change and biodiversity loss in organisations.