BioPrint beyond borders: quantifying the global biodiversity footprint of the Swiss economy
Main Presenter: Fabian Elsener
Co-Authors: Matthias Stucki Michael Götz Corinna Bolliger Reto Deuber
Global consumption and underlying value chains are responsible for irreversible biodiversity loss, un-dermining ecosystem services and increasing environmental, economic and regulatory risks. The Bi-oPrint project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, was launched in November 2025. The inter- and transdisciplinary project team unites experts from Zurich University of Applied Scienc-es, Bern University of Applied Sciences, University of Zurich and the Swiss Business Council for Sus-tainable Development. In the first project year, the team assessed the biodiversity footprint of the Swiss economy and identified economic sectors with high contributions to biodiversity loss. Subse-quently, strategies and practical solutions for corporate biodiversity management are explored to safeguard biodiversity and guide companies in implementing high-impact actions across value chains.
Within the BioPrint project, biodiversity footprinting is conducted with a hybrid lifecycle-based ap-proach, which combines top-down environmentally extended input output analysis with bottom-up LCA to quantify biodiversity loss in Switzerland (domestic) and abroad. The top-down assessment is ap-plied to identify economic sectors in Switzerland with the highest impact on global biodiversity. The bottom-up analysis models specific product categories and individual products in the most biodiversity-relevant sectors in more detail through LCA. This hybrid approach provides a systematic overview of biodiversity loss across sectors as well as detailed insight into high-impact sectors, product catego-ries, products, and services.
Biodiversity impact assessment is based on existing midpoint approaches such as the methods devel-oped by Chaudhary and Brooks1 and Scherer et al.2 , which characterize biodiversity impacts for vari-ous land-use types and intensities, considering vulnerability scores. The results for land-use induced biodiversity loss show that, in the case of a high-income economy like Switzerland, the imports of products and services have even higher impacts than domestic land use with a biodiversity hotspot in coffee, cocoa and other commodities imported from tropical regions.
Furthermore, updated characterization factors for land use impacts from the GLAM project, addition-ally considering habitat fragmentation2 are applied. For endpoint biodiversity assessment, the frame-works LC-IMPACT3 and IMPACT World+4 that assess ecosystem quality integrating various midpoint stressors (e.g. land use, eutrophication and climate change) are used. The overall goal is to provide businesses with easy-to-use biodiversity assessment tools to identify biodiversity hotspots in value chains and implement practical measures to reduce biodiversity loss. By critically discussing the bal-ance between scientific accuracy and corporate applicability, the results advance biodiversity LCA methodology and its practical implementation, with relevant implications for the LCA community at LCIC 2026.
Keywords: EE-IOT, LCA, biodiversity footprint, business, impact assessment
