Thomas S. Ball and his team at Microsoft Research created a truly remarkable tool. It shows the negative effects of food consumption on the extinction risk of 30,875 terrestrial animal species. That groundbreaking tool is known as the LIFE metric. Specifically, it quantifies the negative impact of various ag and trade policies on species extinction all across the globe.
The LIFE metric combines national consumption data across 140 food categories with science-based evaluations of species impact on biodiversity. This holistic method allows for much more explicit understanding of the impacts of diverse food production approaches on species survival. Dr. Alison Eyres contributed to the study by generating two maps that illustrate changes in the likelihood of terrestrial species extinction across the globe under different scenarios.
One of the most compelling discoveries is that beef from Australia and New Zealand has a thirty to forty times higher risk of driving species to extinction. In comparison, beef grown in the UK and Ireland is a far smaller risk. This sharp dichotomy highlights our need to know where our food comes from and the environmental impact of our food choices.
It takes hundreds of times more land to raise cattle for a single kilogram of beef. This practice devastates a majority of the natural ecosystem,” said Dr. Thomas Ball. In particular, he touted the economic benefits of plant-based diets. He claimed that, “on balance, this decision has a far greater effect on species’ survival than producing one kilo of vegetable protein such as beans or lentils.”
The study found that eating beans and lentils is 150 times more supportive of biodiversity than choosing ruminant meat. The UK’s food “extinction footprint” primarily arises from imports, suggesting that domestic agricultural policies alone are insufficient to mitigate biodiversity loss. For example, if all of the UK population became vegetarian overnight, studies find that’s pretty amazing. Imagine if the nation’s negative impact on biodiversity were suddenly cut in half!
At alarming odds like 700 to 1,100 vertebrate species likely going extinct within the next century’s scope. This crisis is inevitable unless we improve our disastrous national agricultural land-use policies. In the last sixty years, almost one-third of the earth’s land surface has been converted to cropland. At the same time, this transformation has drastically increased multiple environmental hazards.
Thomas S. Ball remarked on the interconnectedness of food choices and environmental consequences, stating, “When it comes to decisions about producing food, it’s not enough to focus on one country in isolation. We have a UK agricultural policy that incentivizes farmers to set aside more land for nature and reduce food production. If that means we’re making up the shortfall by relying on imports from more biodiverse places, it could cause far more damage to the species on our planet in the long run.”
The LIFE metric has been integrated into the UK Government’s toolkit for assessing the global environmental impacts of agricultural commodity consumption.