Agriculture, particularly habitat conversion and destruction, poses the greatest threat to global biodiversity. While food production is essential for human needs, it is also the main driver of recent and projected future biodiversity loss, on a scale comparable to one of the largest contributors to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Recent research demonstrated that the impact of different food production on the risk of species extinction can vary in many cases more than an order of magnitude, and in some cases even up to three orders of magnitude.

Quantifying the costs of extinction

To robustly assess the impacts of agriculture on biodiversity and to inform the effective extent of risk mitigation, it is essential to quantify these impacts spatially. Scientists have linked biodiversity metrics LIFE (Land-cover change Impacts on Future Extinctions), which describes the marginal impact of land use on the extinction of approximately 30,000 vertebrate species globally, with data on food consumption and production and modelling of origins.

This approach uses the framework opportunity cost, where the impact of current food consumption on biodiversity is seen as a lost opportunity to restore biodiversity due to continued use of agricultural land.

Animal products and tropical crops lead the impact rankings

The findings confirm that animal products have a significantly greater impact on species extinction risk than staple plant products. The main reason is their intrinsic inefficiency: producing a unit of animal product requires pasture and/or arable land for feed production, leading to high land use and subsequent impacts on extinction.

Specifically, ruminant meat has weighted global median opportunity cost of species extinction approximately 340 times greater than cereals (by weight) and approximately 100 times greater than plant proteins such as soybeans and other legumes.

“Luxury” commodities, such as coffee, cocoa, tea and spices, although they are consumed in smaller quantities.

In contrast, staple crops such as cereals (except rice), vegetables, roots and fruits have a relatively low impact. Sugar beet shows the lowest opportunity cost of extinction per kilogram.

Differences by place of production and consumption

The impact of producing 1 kg also varies within most commodities, often by almost an order of magnitude, with in some cases the variation being considerably greater. The difference is also significant in terms of provenance: commodities produced in tropical or subtropical regions have a generally higher impact per kilogram than those from temperate regions. This is understandable, as tropical regions are home to exceptional levels of biodiversity and endemism. For example, coffee produced in South America and sub-Saharan Africa has an impact approximately ten times greater than that of coffee from Southeast Asia.

An analysis of consumption in six countries (the US, Japan, the UK, Brazil, Uganda and India) showed that ruminant meat consumption contributes significantly to the overall per capita impact.

Implications for international trade and catering

For countries in the Global North, such as the UK and Japan, the vast majority of their consumption impacts (95 % and 98 %) come from imported commodities, meaning that the risk of extinction is transferred to other countries. In contrast, in Brazil, Uganda and India, the impact arises mainly from domestic production.

The study highlights that a dramatic reduction in the consumption of animal products, especially ruminant meat, is key to averting the extinction crisis, especially in wealthier countries. For example, modelling for the US has shown that reducing the proportion of ruminant meat from 4 % of energy to 1 % (in line with the EAT-Lancet diet) reduced the overall opportunity cost of extinction by almost three-quartersEliminating ruminant meat in vegetarian and vegan diets led to a further reduction in impact by more than half.

It is also important for richer countries with low biodiversity that their trade policies do not increase the shift of production of the food they consume to more biodiverse parts of the world, which would lead to a net loss of biodiversity globally.

Recognizing and understanding these patterns is critical for informing decisions at national, subnational, and individual levels to limit the global extinction crisis. JRi