Richard Black BBC News 6 Jun 12;
Almost a third of threats to animal species around the world stem from trade to meet the demands of richer nations, a study concludes.
Forests are cut down for coffee and cocoa plantations, removing animal habitat; elephants and rhinos are poached to provide ivory to East Asia.
Researchers analysed the overall impact of all this on threatened species.
Writing in the journal Nature, they say management of supply chains and product labelling could help stem the trend.
The mainly Australian research team looked at nearly 7,000 threatened species drawn from the internationally recognised Red List.
These records were cross-referenced against analyses of more than 15,000 commodities and traced back through international supply chains.
The overall picture is one where goods whose production damages biodiversity flow from developing countries into their more prosperous counterparts - although this is becoming more complex as economies such as China quickly develop.
Previous studies have found that western demand for such commodities as Brazilian beef, Indonesian palm oil, Mexican coffee production and Vietnamese fishing was harming nature.
But this is believed to be the first attempt to document the global impact of trade on biodiversity.
Other significant issues identified include rubber exports from Malaysia, exploitative fishing in the Philippines and Thailand, production of bananas and tobacco in Colombia, and minerals mining in Ghana.
Purchasing disparity
The US, Japan and Western Europe emerge as the main places where demand is driving biodiversity loss in exporting countries, while Indonesia and Madagascar are the two countries where wildlife is most under threat as a result of international demands.
There are also some examples of high impact trade between neighbouring countries - for example, Mexican goods flowing into the US, and Malaysian produce into Singapore.
The report's authors suggest that both labelling and supply chain management can be deployed as tools against this loss.
Campaigns such as the one mounted in the 1970s against tuna caught using methods that harmed dolphins have on occasion been very successful, persuading western consumers to boycott companies whose products did not live up to their demands.
More recently, companies such as Nestle have decided to source raw materials from suppliers that agree to meet environmental standards - for example, pledging not to destroy virgin rainforest in order to grow palm oil.
The scientists also argue that governments could implement trade sanctions.
The UN Convention on International trade in Endangered Species (CITES) obliges governments to restrict trade in species that have reached a parlous state of existence.
The scientists suggest that "there is no practical difference in terms of imperilment between trading specimens and trading commodities whose production leads to their imperilment.
"The motivation for banning the first kind of trade equally applies to the second kind, and, consequently, trade in biodiversity-implicated commodities should be governed by the same control and licensing procedures."
Consumer products endanger species
The University of Sydney Science Alert 11 Jun 12;
Thirty per cent of threatened species are at risk because of consumption in the developed world according to University of Sydney research. The study mapped the world economy to trace the global trade of goods implicated in biodiversity loss such as coffee, cocoa, and lumber.
"Our findings can be used to improve the regulation and product labelling of thousands of internationally traded products," said Professor Manfred Lenzen, lead author of the research published in Nature today.
Professor Lenzen is from the Integrated Sustainability Analysis group at the University's School of Physics.
The study evaluated over five billion supply chains connecting consumers to over 15,000 commodities produced in 187 countries. This was cross-referenced with a global register of 25,000 endangered and vulnerable species.
"Until now these relationships have only been poorly understood. Our extraordinary number crunching, which took years of data collection and thousands of hours on a supercomputer to process, lets us see these global supply chains in amazing detail for the first time," Professor Lenzen said.
There is increasing awareness that developed countries' consumption of imported products can cause a biodiversity footprint that is larger abroad than at home. The study shows how this is the case for many countries, including the US, Japan, and numerous European states.
Among exporting countries, where the species losses actually occur, on average 35 per cent of recorded threats can be linked to export-led production. In Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and Honduras, this figure is 50 to 60 per cent.
Papua New Guinea, for example, has 171 listed species threatened by export industries including mining, timber, coffee, and cocoa, to a few large trading partners, including Australia.
Agricultural exports from Indonesia, another Australian trading partner, affect 294 species, including tigers.
Australia's trove of unique species means that despite its high consumption, it is a net exporter of implicated goods including mining and agricultural products whose production often drives habitat loss and pollution that threaten particular species.
The researchers say the findings can be used to better protect biodiversity. On the consumer side, they hope sustainability labels become be the norm, not the exception, helped by the information this study makes available.
"We shouldn't let retailers make sustainability labels a premium product. We should ask that they always stock products that are made responsibly, from the bottom shelf to the top shelf," said Barney Foran, a co-author of the study also from the School of Physics.
On the production side, they recommend companies be required to make foreign suppliers accountable to the same production standards they hold at home, as leading manufacturers do with their Asian manufacturers. The authors also say countries should harmonise environmental laws so producers don't simply relocate to the country with the least protections.
Biodiversity will be a major focus at the upcoming Rio+20 Earth Summit Conference later in June.
