Assessing biodiversity impacts is not an easy task! Have you wondered what’s behind the figures used in quantifying the biodiversity footprints of products, industrial sectors or consumers? – This open-access article published in Scientific Data in October 2025 explains how the intactness-based biodiversity impact factor (IBIF) dataset was concluded using the GLOBIO biodiversity model and its means species abundance (MSA) metric. IBIF includes impact factors for vascular plants, warm-blooded vertebrates (birds and mammals) and both species combined. The set of country-level impact factors can be used to attribute losses in local terrestrial biodiversity intactness to emissions and resource use associated with production or consumption in a given country.
Schipper, A.M., van der Marel, M., Bakkenes, M. et al. Impact factors for quantifying country-level terrestrial biodiversity intactness footprints (IBIF). Sci Data 12, 1660 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05946-1
The study also illustrates the international collaboration ongoing for developing necessary tools, methods and datasets for biodiversity footprinting. The authors acknowledge the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program projects BAMBOO Biodiversity and trade: mitigating the impacts of non-food biomass global supply chains and SOSFood Sustainability Optimization for Secure Food Systems. The study contributes to the GLOBIO project (www.globio.info).