What we eat, how we travel, what we consume and how we spend our time is driving immense pressures on biodiversity and the climate. Our current lifestyles, particularly within high income countries and among wealthier populations, are pushing the planet well beyond safe ecological limits. Yet the impact on nature from our lifestyles often remains invisible, disconnected from decision-making and poorly captured by existing policy frameworks. We need robust ways to measure and communicate how our lifestyles affect nature, and to identify ways to reduce our impacts.
The Nature-Positive Lifestyles: Unlocking Opportunities for People and Planet report demonstrates how lifestyle choices in three selected countries can cause substantial and highly uneven pressures on nature, quantified as a ‘biodiversity footprint’. The results inform the policy recommendations outlined in the report, showing the role of biodiversity footprinting in aiding governments to prioritise action, track progress and align national policies with global goals.
We calculated the lifestyle biodiversity footprint of the average citizen in Brazil, Finland and Japan using the BIOVALENT[1] biodiversity footprinting method and report results using the biodiversity equivalent (BDe), a globally comparable indicator estimating the potential share of the world’s species to go extinct. We include food, housing (energy consumption), transport and other consumption (products and services).
Our results paint a clear picture: current lifestyles are a major driver of biodiversity loss. Brazil exhibits the highest biodiversity footprint of all three countries at 44 pBDe per capita per year, followed by Japan (27 pBDe) and then Finland (20 pBDe). Although these numbers may seem abstract at first, they indicate that a significant percentage of global species are at risk of going extinct due to current lifestyle choices. Indeed, if everyone on Earth lived like the average person in Brazil, Japan, or Finland, approximately 36%, 22%, or 16%[2] of all species on Earth, respectively, would be at risk of extinction.
Looking closer, food is the primary lifestyle domain driving biodiversity loss across all three countries, accounting for 51-84% of total biodiversity impacts. Biodiversity loss from food is largely driven by land use associated with the consumption of animal-based foods (pasture land for grazing and cropland for fodder, for example). Mobility is also a major driver of biodiversity loss in many countries, accounting for 29% and 15% of total biodiversity impacts in Japan and Finland. Energy consumption and what we buy further drives biodiversity loss: consumer goods and housing each contribute 6-12% of total biodiversity footprint across the three countries.
This assessment provides a strong foundation for generating policies to support nature-positive lifestyles. Biodiversity footprinting allows us to identify and communicate high- and low-impact lifestyles, trade-offs and synergies between nature and climate targets and to set measurable targets to support the uptake of nature-positive lifestyles. For example, the report results indicate the importance of:
- Prioritising dietary change towards plant-based diets
- Pursuing transport and energy decarbonisation with explicit biodiversity safeguards (particularly avoiding use of biomass)
- Shift the focus of circular economy policies to reduce overconsumption.
Addressing only the visible impacts of human actions (such as local habitat loss) is insufficient to tackle biodiversity loss. Instead, we must also address how underlying consumption patterns drive biodiversity loss across the world, through complex supply chains and across national borders. The responsibility should not solely rest on individual people. Coordinated political support is necessary to support the uptake of nature-positive lifestyles. Biodiversity footprinting should be used to support the design of policies, track progress over time and to set national and global measurable targets for the transition towards nature-positive lifestyles and economies.
[1] See El Geneidy et al., 2026 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14186
[2] Percentage shares were obtained by multiplying country-specific per-capita biodiversity footprint values by the global population of 8.14 billion people in 2024 (United Nations 2024).
