A Princeton study reveals how the consumption of high-income nations drives biodiversity loss in other countries, responsible for 13.3% of all species range loss across the globe.

Biodiversity loss has accelerated at an alarming rate in recent decades, driven largely by human activities such as clearing forests to grow crops or harvest timber. While countries often degrade ecosystems within their own borders through these activities, they also play a significant role in driving habitat loss overseas by outsourcing agricultural production, i.e., importing food or timber from other countries, thereby leading those other countries to destroy their forests to produce the exports. A Princeton study recently published in Nature quantifies for the first time the degree to which countries contribute to global biodiversity loss by shifting the environmental costs of their consumption abroad.

”By importing food and timber, these developed nations are essentially exporting extinction,” said David Wilcove, co-author of the study and Professor of Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, and Public Affairs. “Global trade spreads out the environmental impacts of human consumption, in this case prompting the more developed nations to get their food from poorer, more biodiverse nations in the tropics, resulting in the loss of more species.”