With the alarming increase in consumption we face every day at the expense of natural resources and land use transformation, we need to care more than ever about the impacts these habits and the decisions humans make have on biodiversity.
In our latest lecture (we are alive after our crazy statistics session!), we went through the basics of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the methodology that addresses these problems, with professor Francesca Veronese from the department of Industrial Ecology at NTNU. She introduced simple examples of LCA analysis. My favorite example was the one related with the impacts for global warning of packaging and transporting 1000L of wine for different presentations of it.
Afterwards, Jan presented his research on impact assessment. We made a simple example about the impact of the production of tomatoes in two different countries depending of different factors. We then learned about the importance of LCA on biodiversity conservation, we specifically saw the impact that changes in land use could have on biodiversity. A key supply for studying the potential loss of biodiversity is the location of the species.
We ended the session by discussing how important Citizen Science data can be for this field, especially for species in the red list for threatened species since the spatial distribution and habitat suitability of many of them are not broadly known or observed. Are the more potential contributions of Citizen Science to LCA? The question is still open!