Multi-driver biodiversity impact assessment reveals hidden hotspots in institutional consumption

Abstract Food production is one of the leading drivers of global biodiversity loss. Because food is traded internationally, the biodiversity costs of what we eat are often displaced to distant regions, and the same agricultural pressure causes vastly different levels of harm depending on the ecological sensitivity of the local environment. Here we apply an origin-resolved, multi-driver biodiversity footprint approach to one full year of food procurement records from a German institutional canteen, tracking each product consumed back to its origin of production and quantifying impacts weighted by the ecological sensitivity of each sourcing location. We show that accounting for origin substantially changes which products and places appear most harmful compared to global average approaches, and that a small number of specific commodity–region -driver combinations are responsible for a disproportionate share of total impact. These findings demonstrate that credible biodiversity assessments require origin-resolved, multi-driver approaches, and that effective mitigation must target specific commodities and sourcing regions.