This report compiles scientific evidence (based on published articles, reports, and case studies) of the impacts on land use and biodiversity from consumption with focus on Norway | publishedVersion

Although not apparent to the naked eye, soil is actually one of the most diverse habitats on earth! It contains one of the most diverse assemblages of living organisms known to us, and the issues relating to belowground biodiversity (BGBD) are the same as those related to its more visible counterpart above ground. Its lower visibility, however, has led to less attention being paid to it in the past, especially as there is an absence of 'charismatic' species that attract attention. Yet, belowground biodiversity may be of direct relevance to thehealth of crops, trees and other plants that are desirable to man. So, special attention to the belowground parts of biodiversity may be justified. Giller et al. (1997) reported that a single gram of soil is estimated to contain several thousand species of bacteria alone. Of the 1 500 000 species of fungi estimated to exist worldwide remarkably little is known about soil fungi, apart from the common fungal pathogens and the useful mycorrhizal species which improve crops�?? efficiency in taking up nutrients. Among the soil fauna some 100 000 species of protozoa (Box 1, Table 1) 500 000 species of nematodes and 3 000 species of earthworms are estimated to exist, not to mention the other invertebrate groups. These other groups include animals classified as mesofauna (�??middle-sized�?? ones between 0.1 and 2 mm in length) like springtails and mites and macrofauna (�??larger-sized�?? ones between 2 and 20 mm) like ants, termites, beetles and spiders | D.K Hairiah, 'Effects of land use change on belowground biodiversity', Towards integrated natural resource management in forest margins of the humid tropics: local action and global concerns, p.32, 2001

Human activities, especially conversion and degradation of habitats, are causing global biodiversity declines. How local ecological assemblages are responding is less clear—a concern given their importance for many ecosystem functions and services. We analysed a terrestrial assemblage database of unprecedented geographic and taxonomic coverage to quantify local biodiversity responses to land use and related changes. Here we show that in the worst-affected habitats, these pressures reduce within-sample species richness by an average of 76.5%, total abundance by 39.5% and rarefaction-based richness by 40.3%. We estimate that, globally, these pressures have already slightly reduced average within-sample richness (by 13.6%), total abundance (10.7%) and rarefaction-based richness (8.1%), with changes showing marked spatial variation. Rapid further losses are predicted under a business-as-usual land-use scenario; within-sample richness is projected to fall by a further 3.4% globally by 2100, with losses concentrated in biodiverse but economically poor countries. Strong mitigation can deliver much more positive biodiversity changes (up to a 1.9% average increase) that are less strongly related to countries' socioeconomic status. | Fil: Newbold, Tim. United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre; Reino Unido | Fil: Hudson, Lawrence N.. Natural History Museum. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Hill, Samantha L. L.. United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre; Reino Unido | Fil: Contu, Sara. Natural History Museum. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Lysenko, Igor. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Diaz, Sandra Myrna. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal; Argentina | Fil: Harrison, Michelle L. K.. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Alhusseini, Tamera. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Ingram, Daniel J.. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Itescu, Yuval. Tel-Aviv University. Faculty of Life Sciences. Deptartment of Zoology; Israel | Fil: Kattge, Jens. Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry; Alemania. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research; Alemania | Fil: Kirkpatrick, Lucinda. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences,; Reino Unido | Fil: Kleyer, Michael. University of Oldenburg. Institute of Biology and Environmental Sciences. Landscape Ecology Group; Alemania | Fil: Pinto Correia, David Laginha. Natural History Museum. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Martin, Callum D.. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Meiri, Shai. Tel-Aviv University. Faculty of Life Sciences. Deptartment of Zoology; Israel | Fil: Novosolov, Maria. Tel-Aviv University. Faculty of Life Sciences. Deptartment of Zoology; Israel | Fil: Pan, Yuan. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Phillips, Helen R. P.. Natural History Museum. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Purves, Drew W.. Microsoft Research Cambridge. Computational Science Laboratory, ; Reino Unido | Fil: Robinson, Alexandra. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Simpson, Jake. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Tuck, Sean L.. University of Oxford, Department of Plant Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Weiher, Evan. University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. Biology Department; Estados Unidos | Fil: White, Hannah J.. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Ewers, Robert M.. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido | Fil: Mace, Georgina M.. University College London. Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research. Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment; Reino Unido | Fil: Scharlemann, Jörn P. W.. United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre; Reino Unido | Fil: Purvis, Andy. Natural History Museum. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido. Imperial College London. Department of Life Sciences; Reino Unido

PURPOSE: Land use is a main driver of global biodiversity loss and its environmental relevance is widely recognized in research on life cycle assessment (LCA). The inherent spatial heterogeneity of biodiversity and its non-uniform response to land use requires a regionalized assessment, whereas many LCA applications with globally distributed value chains require a global scale. This paper presents a first approach to quantify land use impacts on biodiversity across different world regions and highlights uncertainties and research needs. METHODS: The study is based on the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)/Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) land use assessment framework and focuses on occupation impacts, quantified as a biodiversity damage potential (BDP). Species richness of different land use types was compared to a (semi-)natural regional reference situation to calculate relative changes in species richness. Data on multiple species groups were derived from a global quantitative literature review and national biodiversity monitoring data from Switzerland. Differences across land use types, biogeographic regions (i.e., biomes), species groups and data source were statistically analyzed. For a data subset from the biome (sub-)tropical moist broadleaf forest, different species-based biodiversity indicators were calculated and the results compared. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: An overall negative land use impact was found for all analyzed land use types, but results varied considerably. Different land use impacts across biogeographic regions and taxonomic groups explained some of the variability. The choice of indicator also strongly influenced the results. Relative species richness was less sensitive to land use than indicators that considered similarity of species of the reference and the land use situation. Possible sources of uncertainty, such as choice of indicators and taxonomic groups, land use classification and regionalization are critically discussed and further improvements are suggested. Data on land use impacts were very unevenly distributed across the globe and considerable knowledge gaps on cause–effect chains remain. CONCLUSIONS: The presented approach allows for a first rough quantification of land use impact on biodiversity in LCA on a global scale. As biodiversity is inherently heterogeneous and data availability is limited, uncertainty of the results is considerable. The presented characterization factors for BDP can approximate land use impacts on biodiversity in LCA studies that are not intended to directly support decision-making on land management practices. For such studies, more detailed and site-dependent assessments are required. To assess overall land use impacts, transformation impacts should additionally be quantified. Therefore, more accurate and regionalized data on regeneration times of ecosystems are needed.

M. Said et al., 'Challenges and impacts of land use and land use planning on ecosystem, biodiversity, and people', ILRI, 2017

Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) of food and agriculture generally include potential effects on global warming, eutrophication, ecotoxocity and acidification some of which again affect biodiversity. However, LCA most often does not include specific indicators of the product’s or agricultural system’s impact (negative or positive) on biodiversity. Using LCA methodology on agricultural products makes it highly relevant to assess the impacts of land use. Some LCA’s include a simple category of land use. This is sometimes interpreted as “nature occupation”. However, if this is the only impact category addressing land use related biodiversity, the LCA cannot distinguish between different forms of agricultural systems, which may differ in their biodiversity impact (e.g. organic versus conventional products). Biologists as well as policy makers consider some agricultural land use, such as grazing semi-natural grasslands, as beneficial for biodiversity preservation. Thus, land use in food production systems can have both positive and negative impacts on biodiversity compared to leaving the land untouched by humans. Simple, operational indicators to account for the different impacts on biodiversity in food production systems could take the point of departure in the most important factors affecting biodiversity (easy obtainable pressure indicators) instead of estimating e.g. species diversity directly.

Counting for as much as 6% of Earth’s terrestrial surface, military land use constitutes an important share of human land use. Yet, only few studies analyse the general impact of military land use on landscape and biodiversity. This article presents a countrywide study of land use, land use change and biodiversity content on all Danish defence sites larger than 10 ha, comprising roughly 40,000 ha or 1% of the Danish terrestrial area. Based on interpretation of historical maps, land use history was analysed for the period from the 1870′s to the present. Furthermore, available national data were applied to assess present land use and biodiversity content within and in the surrounding of defence sites. The historical analysis revealed six typical trajectories of land use change. In terms of total area, the two most important were conservation of open, semi-natural habitat types (47%) and change from agriculture to open, semi-natural habitat types (34%). Results also show, that for sites characterised by these two land use change trajectories, present proportions of open semi-natural habitats as well as biodiversity contents are significantly higher within the sites compared to their surroundings. It is concluded that military land use in most cases had a significant beneficial impact on present day land cover composition and biodiversity.

Land use effects are considered among the main stressors on freshwater biodiversity, with up to 80% of land in Europe under intensive use. Here, we address the impact of arable and urban landscapes on taxon richness, Shannon–Wiener diversity, taxon rareness and taxonomic distinctness of eleven organism groups encompassing vertebrates, invertebrates and plants, occurring in five freshwater ecosystem types across Europe: rivers, floodplains, lakes, ponds and groundwater. In addition, nine geo-climatic descriptors (e.g. latitude, longitude, precipitation) were used to disentangle land use effects from those of natural drivers of biodiversity. Using a variance partitioning scheme based on boosted regression trees and generalised linear regression modelling, we sought: (i) to partition the unique, shared and unexplained variation in the metrics explained by both groups of descriptor variables, (ii) to quantify the contribution of each descriptor variable to biodiversity variation in the most parsimonious regression model and (iii) to identify interactions of land use and natural descriptors. The variation in biodiversity uniquely described by land use was consistently low across both ecosystem types and organism groups. In contrast, geo-climatic descriptors uniquely, and jointly with land use, explained significantly more variance in all 39 biodiversity metrics tested. Regression models revealed significant interactions between geo-climatic descriptors and land use for a third of the models, with interactions accounting for up to 17% of the model's deviance. However, no consistent patterns were observed related to the type of biodiversity metric and organism group considered. Subdividing data according to the strongest geo-climatic gradient in each dataset aimed to reduce the strength of natural descriptors relative to land use. Although data sub-setting can highlight land use effects on freshwater biodiversity, sub-setting our data often failed to produce stronger land use effects. There was no increase in spatial congruence in the subsets, suggesting that the observed land use effects were not dependent on the spatial extent of the subsets. Our results confirm significant joint effects of, and interactions between, land use and natural environmental descriptors on freshwater biodiversity, across ecosystem types and organism groups. This has implications for biodiversity monitoring. First, the combined analysis of anthropogenic and natural descriptors is a prerequisite for the analysis of human threats to biodiversity. Second, geo-climatically, but not necessarily geographically more homogeneous datasets can help unmask the role of anthropogenic descriptors. And third, whole community-based biodiversity metrics (including taxon richness) are not ideal indicators of anthropogenic effects on biodiversity at broad scales.

International audience | Land-use change is a major driver of biodiversity loss worldwide. Although biodiversity often shows a delayed response to land-use change, previous studies have typically focused on a narrow range of current landscape factors and have largely ignored the role of land-use history in shaping plant and animal communities and their functional characteristics. Here, we used a unique database of 220,000 land-use records to investigate how 20-y of land-use changes have affected functional diversity across multiple trophic groups (primary producers, mutualists, herbivores, invertebrate predators, and vertebrate predators) in 75 grassland fields with a broad range of land-use histories. The effects of land-use history on multitrophic trait diversity were as strong as other drivers known to impact biodiversity, e.g., grassland management and current landscape composition. The diversity of animal mobility and resource-acquisition traits was lower in landscapes where much of the land had been historically converted from grassland to crop. In contrast, functional biodiversity was higher in landscapes containing old permanent grasslands, most likely because they offer a stable and high-quality habitat refuge for species with low mobility and specialized feeding niches. Our study shows that grassland-to-crop conversion has long-lasting impacts on the functional biodiversity of agricultural ecosystems. Accordingly, land-use legacy effects must be considered in conservation programs aiming to protect agricultural biodiversity. In particular, the retention of permanent grassland sanctuaries within intensive landscapes may offset ecological debts.