Accounting for biodiversity impacts of consumption and production: current gaps and frontiers.

Daniel Itzamna Avila-Ortega , Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Sarah Elisabeth Cornell, Daniel Dean Moran, Gustav Engstrom

The way humans produce and consume material goods continues to be a primary driving force on biodiversity decline. Despite significant advances in quantifying biodiversity footprints, important differences exist across types of approaches and indicators. These include, what aspects of biodiversity are measured and how they are reported. In this scoping review, we provide an overview of biodiversity impact metrics developed to assess biodiversity impacts by human production and consumption activities.

We use systematic literature mapping to scan over 1,200,000 records sourced from OpenAlex. Using natural language processing models and a cosine similarity index, we reduce our corpus to more than 7,000 records and finally include 154 works as part of the review.

We find that biodiversity footprinting metrics have evolved substantially since their initial development in the late 1990s. Initially focused on land use as the principal driver of biodiversity loss, metrics now also address climate change, pollution, invasive species, and, in some cases, overexploitation. We propose a classification into four families of biodiversity-related metrics: impact assessment metrics dominate (64%), followed by pressure-impact metrics (12%), pressure-impact combined with impact assessment (10%), and state-based metrics (5%), alongside a minor contribution from theoretical ecology in combination with others.

Impact assessment metrics, rooted in industrial ecology, specialize around three ecological models to characterize the effects of diverse pressures on species: (i) species–area relationships and equivalent connected areas for land use, (ii) species–discharge relationships for water flow alterations, and (iii) species sensitivity distributions for pollution impacts.

Existing metrics cover terrestrial, freshwater, and marine realms, with a predominant focus on taxonomic and functional diversity. Phylogenetic diversity remains substantially underrepresented, and while many metrics operate at the species level, relatively few extend to ecosystem assessments, and none adequately capture genetic diversity. Except for amphibians, birds, mammals, reptiles, and vascular plants, species groups such as fishes, insects, bryophytes, algae, fungi, and non-insect invertebrates across realms remain largely underrepresented in current biodiversity metrics.

Future work should focus on (1) bridging scientific disciplines like biology, ecology and conservation with industrial- and social ecology, (2) advancing and refining existing methods to include more taxa, (3) developing new methods to account for existing gaps and (4) harmonise metrics with conservation and mitigation efforts.