This study has been commissioned by AB TetraPak, Global Environment.
The objective of the study is to review existing proposals for biodiversity indicators for forest management, placing the indicators within a common framework.
This study has been performed for a confidential client.
The objective of the study is to develop a criteria list, outlining what criteria a good biodiversity indicator for forest management should fulfil, with a special focus on the indicator requirements of product life cycle assessments, and any specific requirements related to raw material acquisition.
The developed criteria list is intended to be used for a review of indicators already proposed in previous studies, to result in an assessment of the extent to which the different proposed indicators fulfil the suggested criteria.
Human activities influence biodiversity in numerous ways by increasing the likelihood of some species or ecosystems to survive at the expense of others, most often leading to a reduction in biodiversity. This happens through:
The impacts from releases (emissions) of nutrients and toxic substances are well covered in product life cycle assessments (LCA), through impact categories such as "climate change (global warming)", "stratospheric ozone depletion", "human toxicity", "eco-toxicity", "photo-oxidant formation", "acidification" and "nutrification". All of these categories of impacts may eventually lead to changes in biodiversity, and attempts have been made to aggregate such impacts on biodiversity in terms of biodiversity-weighted square-meter-years (also known as PDF×m2×years, where PDF stands for Potentially Disappeared Fraction of species, a concept originating from ecotoxicity assessments).
While forest management may indeed have the potential to influence the above mentioned impact categories through regulating the releases from forestry activities, the purpose of this study is not to develop criteria for biodiversity indicators of these impacts (which also take place outside of the forests) or the impacts from releases of alien species. Rather, we shall focus solely on providing criteria for indicators of direct impacts of forests management on forest biodiversity, i.e. the issues of physical changes and removal of soil, nutrients or biomass. Nevertheless, it would be desirable that biodiversity indicators for such physical changes could eventually be related to the biodiversity indicators of the release related impact categories, so that this "compatibility" in itself could be a criterion for a good indicator, as we will discuss further in Chapter 3.
The possible criteria are discussed in three chapters. Chapter 2 describes the specific requirements of Product Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), while Chapter 3 describes the broader requirements for biodiversity indicators in general. Chapter 4 describes more general criteria that apply to indicators as such.
The main goal of CREEA was to refine and elaborate economic and environmental accounting principles as discussed in the London Group and consolidated in the future SEEA 2012, to test them in practical data gathering, to troubleshoot and refine approaches, and show added value of having such harmonized data available via case studies. The project included work and experiences from major previous projects focused on developing harmonized data sets for integrated economic and environmental accounting (most notably EXIOPOL, FORWAST and a series of EUROSTAT projects in Environmental Accounting). Most data gathered in CREEA were consolidated in the form of Environmentally Extended Supply and Use tables (EE SUT) and update and expand the EXIOPOL database. In this way, CREEA produced a global Multi-Regional EE SUT with a unique detail of 130 sectors and products, 30 emissions, 80 natural resources, and 43 countries plus a rest of world. A unique contribution of CREEA was that also SUT in physical terms were created.
The CREEA project demonstrates a full integration of global mass flow, energy flow, emissions, land-use and economic accounts which all together are used to create a multi-regional hybrid life cycle inventory database. The integrated approach in the CREEA project yielded a global multi-regional trade-linked hybrid LCA database, which involved detailed global and national energy, mass and monetary balances for products as well as industries. It is recommended to use such databases should be the starting point of any LCA database.
Read more in CREEA-report 4.1, CREEA-report 4.2, CREEA-report 4.3 and CREEA-report 6.2 or the CREEA-booklet; see also our presentation for SETAC Europe 24th Annual Meeting: Full integration of LCA with other assessment tools – new application areas and harmonized modelling approaches and the presentation at LCAFood 2014: Life cycle assessment of the global food consumption. Read our paper in Sustainability: Global Sustainability Accounting – Developing EXIOBASE for Multi-Regional Footprint Analysis.
