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ESD Professor Stephan Pfister and PhD Student Shuntian Wang contributed to a news article by SRF about the CO2 emissions imported to Switzerland. While official territorial emissions in Switzerland are falling, the picture looks different, when supply chains are taken into account: Then, Switzerland has one of the highest climate impacts per capita.
Preventing food waste can benefit both consumers and the environment. This is the result of a 2019 study by ESD researchers Claudia Beretta and Stefanie Hellweg. An article in the newspaper "Tagesanzeiger" has covered this research in an article about food waste.
Exporting agricultural products from tropical regions to China, the USA, the Middle East, and Europe is three times more harmful to biodiversity than previously assumed. Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and ETH chair of Ecological Systems Design have shown this by tracking how agricultural exports from 1995 to 2022 affected land use changes in the producing countries. Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Madagascar are particularly affected by species loss.