Do Sudden Shocks Foster or Hamper Transitions Toward Low-Biodiversity-Impact Biomass Supply Chains?

Agricultural and timber supply chains are increasingly exposed to a growing constellation of global shocks—including pandemics, armed conflicts, trade disruptions, and extreme weather events. These disturbances propagate through international supply chains, reshaping trade flows and altering related pressures on ecosystems. This study examines whether such shocks create openings for transitions toward lower biodiversity-impact supply chains or, alternatively, reinforce the dominance and structural resilience of high-impact supply chains.

To assess ecological pressure, we leverage a dataset on bilateral trade matrices for agricultural and timber commodities, combined with product specific values of embodied Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (eHANPP) – a proxy indicator of pressures on ecosystems and biosphere integrity. We develop a formal definition of what constitutes a shock in biomass trade, characterizing shocks as statistically significant, sudden, abrupt deviations from expected trade patterns that exceed normal variability. We explore a suite of statistical and network-analytic approaches, including outlier-based shock detection, structural break analysis, and difference in differences approaches, to detect shocks in biomass trade. We integrate our trade-based shock indicators with an external dataset on polycrisis events, to attribute these shocks to major socio-ecological disruptions. We investigate the resilience of supply chains, i.e. how different supply chains respond to identified shocks. Especially, we assess whether the resilience differs between high-HANPP commodity complexes (e.g., feed–livestock systems) and lower-impact supply chains (e.g., plant-based foods).

By integrating eHANPP with global trade network dynamics and exogenous shock analysis, this work aims to develop new approaches to define, depict, and analyze shocks and resilience in biomass supply chains, and understand how sudden poly-crises events shape the trajectory of biodiversity-relevant supply chain transformations. The findings contribute to understanding whether global shocks act primarily as catalysts for biodiversity transitions or as stabilizers of existing high-impact supply chains, with implications for policy design in an era of escalating systemic risk.