Global Species Loss Embodied in Oil Crop Supply Chains from 1995 to 2020 and its Drivers

Oil crop cultivation has emerged as a major driver of global biodiversity loss through demand driven land use expansion, yet its temporally explicit, supply chain wide impacts remain poorly assessed. We quantify changes in global species loss embodied in oil crop supply chains from 1995 to 2020 from a multi dimensional perspective: we combine a 0.05° spatially explicit biodiversity impact assessment method that accounts for land use intensity (LUI) with a hybrid multiregional input output model, enhanced supply chain mapping, and structural decomposition analysis. In a first step, we reconstruct annual cultivated area and crop specific LUI and link them to state of the art global species loss factors to derive a time series of potential global species loss (PSLglo). In 2020, land use for oil crop cultivation caused a biodiversity impact of 0.015 PSLglo, equivalent to the potential long term loss of about 1.5% of assessed plant and terrestrial vertebrate species if current land use patterns persist. Tropical regions, which account for only 43% of harvested area, bear 78% of these impacts, driven mainly by oil palm, coconut and soybean production. The resulting annual time series shows that oil crops alone have generated an extinction debt that has consistently exceeded proposed planetary boundary thresholds for biosphere integrity throughout 1995–2020. Nearly half of global impacts are outsourced via trade, with increasing imports by China, the European Union and North America driving species loss in producer countries such as Indonesia and Brazil. Over 1995–2020, global biodiversity impact from oil crop cultivation increased by ~69%, with oil palm and soybean together explaining most of this growth. The structural decomposition analysis shows that ~82% of the increase in consumption based impacts is related to rising per capita consumption, which is partly offset by yield improvements but reinforced by expansion into biodiversity rich regions. Our findings underscore the urgent need for policies targeting sustainable production and at the same time consumption across global oil crop supply chains and provide a basis informing such actions.