Circular economy interventions in four key sectors can halt global biodiversity loss and help the world's biodiversity recover, finds this study.
Tackling root causes - Halting biodiversity loss through the circular economy, written by experts from Sitra and Vivid Economics, is the first to quantify the role a circular economy can play in tackling global biodiversity loss, targeting the four sectors with the largest impacts:
food and agriculture
construction
textiles
forest and forestry
Circular interventions in these sectors can halt biodiversity loss even if no other action is taken. And more than that, the study finds that the world’s biodiversity can recover to 2000 levels by 2035, if the circular interventions are implemented.
Urban agriculture comes with its own share of environmental impacts. Circular strategies promise to reduce these impacts, but not all strategies are resource efficient and environmentally effective.
This paper finds that the most eco-friendly and circular strategies for urban agriculture, taking a Mediterranean tomato crop as a case study, include:
Struvite (phosphate mineral recovered from wastewater treatment) instead of non-renewable phosphate fertiliser to conserve freshwater
Recycled steel and materials for urban agricultural infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions, toxicity and freshwater pollution
Closed-loop irrigation to minimise ocean and freshwater pollution. However, if new infrastructure is required, it could lead to an increase in carbon emissions.
Agroamb Prodalt SL is a rural SME working in the primary sector. It provides agricultural services for farmers and organic fertilisers from biodegradable waste generated in the primary and agri-food sectors. Its process sanitises biodegradable waste and animal by-products with lime and produces organic fertilisers (turning these waste materials into resources).
Italy's Puglia Region has large expanses of olive groves. Pruning these trees yields around 800 kilotonnes of residual biomass each year and Fiusis uses this biomass to produce energy.
Commissioned by the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP), which advises the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and co-authored by Circle Economy and Shifting Paradigms, this report uncovers the range of socio-economic and environmental co-benefits that circular mitigation interventions can bring to GEF countries of operation.
The report supports strategic advice by the STAP to the GEF and its implementing partners, and helps carve out a role for these bodies in accelerating the transition to a low-carbon circular economy. Its findings will be highly relevant to the development of future GEF projects and programmes across its different focal areas.
The City of Helsinki has coordinated a project on the reuse of excavated soil in construction projects across the city. This project consists of improving coordination of how and where excavated soil is used.
Alchemia-nova, the Institute for innovative phytochemistry and closed loop processes, has colloborated with vertECO, GRETA and LooPi to develop three types of green walls, which treat wastewater to service water standards and create plant biomass and fertiliser.
Vanheede Biomass Solutions processes packaged or unpackaged food items that, for various reasons, are no longer fit for human or animal consumption. Fermentable residue is gathered and processed at a bio-methanisation plant in order to generate green energy.
