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Identifying species threat hotspots from global supply chains

Abstract

Identifying hotspots of species threat has been a successful approach for setting conservation priorities. One important challenge in conservation is that, in many hotspots, export industries continue to drive overexploitation. Conservation measures must consider not just the point of impact, but also the consumer demand that ultimately drives resource use. To understand which species threat hotspots are driven by which consumers, we have developed a new approach to link a set of biodiversity footprint accounts to the hotspots of threatened species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The result is a map connecting consumption to spatially explicit hotspots driven by production on a global scale. Locating biodiversity threat hotspots driven by consumption of goods and services can help to connect conservationists, consumers, companies and governments in order to better target conservation actions.

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Figure 1: Global hotspots of species threat linked to consumption in the United States.
Figure 2: Selected enlargements of threat hotspots.
Figure 3: Decomposition of threat hotspots linked to consumption in the United States by threat cause.
Figure 4

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science through its Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (A) 15H05341, the Norwegian Research Council grant #255483/E50, the PRINCE project of the Swedish Environment Agency and the Belmont Forum TSUNAGARI project. We thank A. Hart for comments that have improved the work.

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Contributions

K.K. designed the research. D.M. and K.K. conducted the analysis. D.M. prepared the figures. D.M. and K.K. wrote the paper. Both authors contributed equally to this work.

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Correspondence to Keiichiro Kanemoto.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Moran, D., Kanemoto, K. Identifying species threat hotspots from global supply chains. Nat Ecol Evol 1, 0023 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-016-0023

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