Hotspots of Mining-Related Biodiversity Loss in Global Supply Chains and the Potential for Reduction through Renewable Electricity.

Anticipated infrastructure growth and energy transition may exacerbate biodiversity loss through increased demand for mining products. This study uses an enhanced multiregional input-output database (REX, Resolved EXIOBASE) and supply chain impact mapping (SCIM) method to assess global biodiversity loss associated with mining-related land use. We identify hotspots in the supply chain of mining products, compare the impact of fossil and renewable electricity, and estimate the share of mining in total global impacts. We found that half of the global mining-related biodiversity loss occurs in Indonesia, Australia, and New Caledonia. Major international trade flows of embodied biodiversity loss involve Indonesia's coal exports to China and India, New Caledonia's nickel exports to Japan and Australia, and Australia's iron and bauxite exports to China. Key end-consumers include China's growing infrastructure and the EU's and USA's household consumption. Electricity generation accounted for 10% of global mining-related biodiversity loss in 2014. The impact of coal-fired electricity was 10 times higher than that of renewables per unit of electricity generated. Globally, mining contributes to less than 1% of the total land use-related biodiversity loss, which is dominated by agriculture. Our results provide transparency in sourcing more sustainable mining products and underline synergies in fostering renewables to meet local biodiversity and global climate targets.

A highly resolved MRIO database for analyzing environmental footprints and Green Economy Progress.

Moving towards a greener economy requires detailed information on the environmental impacts of global value chains. Environmentally-extended multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis plays a key role in providing this information, but current databases are limited in their spatial (e.g. EXIOBASE3) or sectoral resolution (e.g. Eora26 and GTAP) as well as their indicator coverage. Here, we present an automated, transparent, and comparably time-efficient approach to improve the resolution, quality, and indicator coverage of an existing MRIO database. Applied on EXIOBASE3, we disaggregate and improve the limited spatial resolution by weighting each element with country and sector specific shares derived from Eora26, FAOSTAT, and previous studies. The resolved database covers 189 countries, 163 sectors, and a cutting-edge set of environmental and socio-economic indicators from the years 1995 to 2015. The importance of our improvements is highlighted by the EU-27 results, which reveal a significant increase in the EU's water stress and biodiversity loss footprint as a result of the spatial disaggregation and regionalized assessment. In 2015, a third of the EU's water stress and half of its biodiversity loss footprint was caused in the countries aggregated as rest of the world in EXIOBASE3. This was mainly attributed to the EU's food imports, which induce comparably high water stress and biodiversity loss in Egypt and Madagascar, respectively. In a second example, we use our database to add carbon, water stress and biodiversity loss footprints to the Green Economy Progress (GEP) Measurement Framework. Most countries have not achieved their environmental target and many countries, facing strong future population growth, show increasing footprints. Our results demonstrate that far more action is needed to move towards a greener economy globally, especially through supply chain management. The attached database provides detailed information on the environmental impacts of global value chains to plan efficient strategies for a greener economy.

A new method for analyzing sustainability performance of global supply chains and its application to material resources.

Supply chains become increasingly globalized. Multi-regional input-output databases contain all the information to assess impacts along the value chain, but standard calculation routines to track the impacts of any sector along the global upstream and downstream value chain are missing. Mapping the impacts of materials has been a particular challenge owing to difficulties with double-counting. This is attributed to the strong intertwining of the material supply chain meaning that different materials occur in the supply chains of other materials. Here, we present a new method which can be applied to any MRIO system to track the impacts of any sector or region without double-counting upstream and downstream the global value chain. We apply this approach to EXIOBASE3 and implement a cutting-edge set of regionalized environmental impact categories and socio-economic indicators. Applied to global material production, our method shows that the issue of double-counting (prevented in this study) would overestimate global impacts of materials by up to 30%. In contrast, assessing only the direct impacts would lead to an underestimation by ~20%. Our evaluation further reveals that 25-35% of global material-related impacts are embodied in trade among ten world regions. Thereby, we identify the major international trade relations of key materials and found a clear trend of industrialized nations causing impacts in less developed economies. It was further revealed that during 1995-2011, the share of materials in total global climate change impacts has remained almost constant at ~50%, but total impacts have significantly increased for minerals and fossils. Our results demonstrate the importance for improved environmental policy strategies that target several stages of the global value chain. The methodology is provided as Matlab tool and can be applied to any material, industrial sector and region to track the related impacts upstream and downstream the global value chain.

Comparison of Raman and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy for the Quantification of Microplastics in the Aquatic Environment.

Microplastics (MPs, <5 mm) have been reported as emerging environmental contaminants, but reliable data are still lacking. We compared the two most promising techniques for MP analysis, namely, Raman and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, by analyzing MPs extracted from North Sea surface waters. Microplastics >500 µm were visually sorted and manually analyzed by µ-Raman and attenuated total reflection (ATR)-FTIR spectroscopy. Microplastics ≤500 µm were concentrated on gold-coated filters and analyzed by automated single-particle exploration coupled to µ-Raman (ASPEx-µ-Raman) and FTIR imaging (reflection mode). The number of identified MPs >500 µm was slightly higher for µ-Raman (+23%) than ATR-FTIR analysis. Concerning MPs ≤500 µm, ASPEx-µ-Raman quantified two-times higher MP numbers but required a four-times higher analysis time compared to FTIR imaging. Because ASPEx-µ-Raman revealed far higher MP concentrations (38-2621 particles m-3) compared to the results of previous water studies (0-559 particles m-3), the environmental concentration of MPs ≤500 µm may have been underestimated until now. This may be attributed to the exceptional increase in concentration with decreasing MP size found in this work. Our results demonstrate the need for further research to enable time-efficient routine application of ASPEx-µ-Raman for reliable MP counting down to 1 µm.