NORTH-SOUTH CENTRE - ETH - North-South Centre North-South ...

“myEcosystem”: Assessing and compensating
ecosystem impacts of agricultural products
Many products consumed in the industrialised world originate
from developing countries and emerging economies.
Agricultural products such as fodder crops, food and biofuels
create multi-faceted environmental impacts in the
countries of origin. Biodiversity loss is amongst the most
severe impacts, driven primarily by land and water use for
agriculture. In this project, we aim at developing new methods
in life cycle assessment (LCA) to quantify these impacts
to biodiversity in the South caused by consumption of
globally traded commodities in the North. In addition, we
will provide decision-support tools that indicate potential
measures for reducing this impact. Three complementary
doctoral theses and one post-doc study investigate case
studies in Africa and South America.
fed to Swiss cows for milk production. Accounting for such
dispa rate processes requires a truly global approach. This
project aims at developing a spatially explicit global assessment
method. Two approaches will be used: (i) A top-down
approach, using global datasets to derive meaningful estimates
of impact to biodiversity in all regions of the world,
and (ii) a bottom-up approach, modelling biodiversity on a
landscape level, taking the effects of landscape configuration
and local biodiversity data into account.
Development of a global and spatially differentiated methodology
for the assessment of agricultural (ground-) water
use impacts on terrestrial biodiversity (Francesca Verones)
Impacts of land use on biodiversity: Development of a
spatially differentiated global assessment methodology
for life cycle assessment (Laura de Baan)
During the various stages of a product’s life cycle, potentially
damaging land use activities occur in different world
regions. For example, phosphorus mining in Morocco provides
inputs to soya bean production in Brazil, which is
Groundwater-related impacts on biodiversity from lowering
water tables arise from both direct and indirect use of
water: Groundwater use for irrigation and damming of upstream
rivers or altered recharge patterns. Such impacts affect
fragile, groundwater-dependent terrestrial ecosystems,
typically located in arid and semi-arid areas harbouring a
unique flora and fauna. The aim of this research is to develop
a globally applicable, spatially explicit assessment method
for groundwater related impacts, focusing on direct
groundwater use in water-limited areas. We will apply (i) a
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Research collaboration
UNEP
Project leader
Stefanie Hellweg
Additional supervisors
Michael Kreuzer
Roland Scholz
Annette Köhler
Thomas Köllner
Doctoral students
Francesca Verones
Michael Curran
Laura de Baan
Postdoctoral student
Karin Bartl
Collaborators
Marion Cheatle, UNEP
Guido Sonnemann, UNEP
Duration
July 2009 – June 2012
The Santa Rosa wetland is located near Chancay along the
Peruvian Coast. Water enters the wetland from the Rio Chancay,
via exfiltration of the groundwater. Eutrophication and
associated impacts to biodiversity due to upstream agriculture
is a long-standing problem.