Quantifying Europe's biodiversity footprints and the role of urbanization and income

Abstract

Non-technical abstract Biodiversity footprinting links consumers to the biodiversity pressure their consumption induces, thereby informing choices and enabling participation in remediation measures. In order for countries, cities and households to reduce their impacts it is useful to know more precisely what the various drivers of their footprints are. Here we ask: do urban or rural areas in Europe exert higher biodiversity footprints? And how strongly coupled are income and biodiversity losses? Studying urban versus rural households at the country level in Europe, we found both have generally similar footprints, but that higher income households clearly drive higher footprints.