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The biodiversity footprint of consumption in the Czech Republic
Matuštík, Jan ; Vačkářová, Davina Elena (advisor) ; Weinzettel, Jan (referee)
The exponential increase in the scale of human influence on Earth, especially in the past century, has now led to a crisis of biodiversity. Most direct drivers of the biodiversity crisis are present at local scales - local ecosystems are destroyed by a land use change, local populations are annihilated by overhunting. Nevertheless, in the globalized world, our actions do not only affect the ecosystems directly around us but also those located on the other side of the globe. Next to the direct impacts we pose on the ecosystems we live in, we are also partly responsible for the indirect, tele-coupled impacts we pose on distant ecosystems. The goal of this study is to map the impacts consumers in the Czech Republic cause to ecosystems in other countries. Environmental footprints, and specifically biodiversity footprint, are the tools commonly used to measure such distant environmental impacts and to allocate responsibility for them to the final consumers. There are currently multiple methodologies to quantify biodiversity footprint which are, nevertheless, burdened by some methodological problems or do not properly fit the goal of this study. Therefore, a novel method was developed here employing the Biodiversity Intactness Index as the measure of the state of ecosystems. This biodiversity footprint,...
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