Biodiversity footprints of 151 popular dishes from around the world

One critical step to promote sustainable consumption is traceability as it improves the transparency of environmental actions [6]. Traceability helps to tackle the opacity of agri-food commodities’ supply chains due to international trade [7], where impacts on biodiversity such as the loss of habitat associated with consumption of a product expands well beyond the place of consumption [8]. Allowing environmentally conscious consumers to understand the impacts of their food purchasing and consumption decisions on the environment could reduce their environmental footprint by focusing on more sustainable products. For instance, sustain- ability information increased the purchasing intention rate by 1.15 points for users looking directly for sustainable products but had no impacts on buyers not looking specifically for sus- tainable products [9]. Currently, however, consumers’ decisions are mostly driven by price, taste and health, with sustainability considerations still requiring transparent and regulated labels [10]. Although the proportion of consumers that actively buys green-labelled products is relatively small (17% in Europe with a typical profile of young educated women for instance for fish), there is a large proportion of latent consumers that are willing to potentially pay more for environmentally friendly products (75% in Europe) which could become actual purchasers if price, freshness and origin, align [11]. Despite the large role of food consumption on biodiversity declines [12, 13], there are

major gaps in biodiversity impacts accounting and reporting for businesses [14] with only 10 out of the 465 environmental certificates compiled by Ecolabel indexes specifically mentioning biodiversity [15]. This reflects the low availability of biodiversity footprint information as a cri- terion for consumers to choose products as compared to other criteria such as carbon footprint which is much more prevalent in labelling [16]. A lack of information on environmental issues and knowledge deters environmentally conscious consumers from purchasing green products [17], resulting in a slow transition towards sustainable diets. The assessment of biodiversity impacts for specific ingredients and diets has progressed recently. For instance, with the biodiversity damage potential method which consists in com- paring the species richness in a land use allocated to food production with a natural land use in a given biome. The proportion of species richness reduction attributed to land conversion from natural habitat to agriculture is then multiplied by the area of land converted to obtain impact scores [18]. Using this method, the types of foods involved in a specific diet can then be linked to the tabulated species richness impacts [19]. Research has also identified cropland footprints of dietary choices in e.g. Australia and Sweden using biodiversity impact factors and species-area relationships [20] at the ecoregion level [21, 22]. Species-area relationships present however limitations as they cannot capture the effect of the fragmentation of the landscape on

extinction probability [23, 24]. A rarely explored alternative for biodiversity footprint analysis, yet a backbone for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List analy- sis of extinction threat, is to ascertain the area of the range of individual species that has been lost [25]. The development of recent datasets that identify the encroachment of specific crops on the ranges of birds, mammals and amphibians [26] opens an opportunity for alternative approaches for biodiversity footprint estimation. Even though the previous identification of the biodiversity footprint in ingredients and diets can be very helpful for consumers, consumption decisions are not only done at the ingre- dient level, but at the product, or even, at dish level. A mismatch between the levels of aggrega- tion of information and the consumers’ purchasing decision needs can pose a barrier to the adoption of sustainable consumption. Recent analyses of 57,000 products assessing greenhouse gas emissions and land use impacts, among others, helps bridge the gap between primary ingredients and composite products that are actively purchased (e.g. the environmental PLOS ONE Biodiversity footprint of popular dishes PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296492 February 21, 2024 2 / 15