Perforation - human activity that creates “holes” in the landscape - has lasting effects that are still rarely measured in a way that is useful for decision-making. The timing matters: as fossil fuels are phased out, demand for metals and minerals is expected to surge because they are essential for large-scale electrification and digitalisation. That, in turn, is likely to drive more mining and quarrying worldwide - making it increasingly important to understand not only what happens inside the extraction site boundary, but where mines and quarries fragment surrounding habitats and increase biodiversity risk.
The method Carla has developed can help identify high risk areas and supply chain hotspots before further landscape fragmentation takes place. The core idea is straightforward: environmental assessments often focus on the footprint of the extraction site itself, while missing how the wider landscape is disrupted and broken up.
Creating a new biodiversity footprint
Carla Coelho works with life cycle assessment (LCA) - a method that accounts for a product’s environmental impacts across its entire value chain, from raw material extraction to waste.
"Carbon footprints are a well known example, but I’ve been working on an equivalent for biodiversity", says Carla. "Creating a biodiversity footprint, though, is much harder. The same land use can have very different consequences to biodiversity depending on where it happens and how the surrounding landscape has already been shaped by human activity. Still, comparisons are possible but must take into account that where things are produced or extracted affects biodiversity at the site, including the wider landscape".
- Those are the questions I was asking: how much pressure, environmental impact, and human activity are there? I was interested in what is called perforation. It’s like punching holes in a piece of paper: you create gaps. If the land use is hostile to biodiversity you end up with a perforated landscape. That is typically true for mines and especially in remote areas, because we do not have much left of those.
So, Carla and the team she worked with developed an indicator that estimates how much a land use at a specific location contributes to perforation - in other words, how likely it is that the land use taking place is disturbing an otherwise continuous habitat. In the paper, the index is applied at global scale to 102,646 quarries and mines (sourced from OpenStreetMap), highlighting both the scope of the analysis and its potential for broad, comparative use.
"If the land use is in the middle of a city, it is unlikely to be perforating a natural habitat, but if it is in the middle of the Amazonia, you it will be perforating. And this can be measured with our method".
Improved decision-making
Carla Coelho’s approach indicates the level of human activities in the area around a quarry or mine, so decision makers can see not just the footprint of a site, but how it may fragment habitats in the wider landscape. And that is why this matters: two mines of the same size pose very different biodiversity risks depending on whether they sit in a heavily modified area or in a largely intact habitat. In practice, the indicator can be calculated using widely available map data, which makes it suitable for life cycle assessment and as an early screening input to environmental impact assessment in the supply chain.
This means it can support supply chain due diligence in procurement, lending, and investment by helping organisations identify sites where extraction is most likely to disrupt otherwise intact habitat.
While this kind of landscape-context assessment is not yet standard, the method is designed fully applicable in practice. The ambition is that the indicator can provide decision makers with increased learning about their supply chain, so biodiversity can be integrated in the decision process within the industry and financial sector.
Read the article in Science Direct
“Landscape perforation in life cycle assessment: Method development with global application to quarries and mines” (link to sciencedirect.com)
Carla Coelhos profile in Research Portal (link to Lunds University Research Portal)