Biodiversity loss and climate change are increasingly recognised as interconnected environmental crises that should not be addressed separately. While companies have become key actors in the transition towards a low-carbon economy, corporate climate initiatives are still mostly assessed through their greenhouse gas emission reduction potential. This carbon-centred approach may overlook broader environmental effects, particularly potential trade-offs with biodiversity. This issue is especially relevant in the high-end watchmaking and jewellery sector, where direct operational emissions are relatively limited but environmental pressures are strongly embedded in long and complex supply chains involving precious metals, gemstones, packaging materials, energy use, transport, and upstream industrial processes.
This thesis examines to what extent low-carbon initiatives implemented by companies in the high-end watchmaking and jewellery sector contribute to reducing environmental pressures on biodiversity, or whether they generate broader ecological trade-offs that may adversely affect ecosystem quality. The research is based on a two-step approach. First, publicly available corporate reports were analysed to identify, quantify, and classify low-carbon initiatives across a final sample of 14 companies and and corporate groups, including individual brands, high-end groups, and selected upstream actors. A total of 264 initiatives were identified, of which 139 were considered sufficiently documented to estimate the expected reduction in CO₂eq. relative to baselines scenarios. Second, 18 representative initiatives were modelled using Life Cycle Impact Assessment in openLCA, with the ecoinvent 3.12 database and the ReCiPe 2016 Hierarchist method. For each case study, a baseline scenario was compared with a low-carbon scenario, focusing on Climate Change and Ecosystem Quality indicators.
The results show that all modelled initiatives reduce climate change impacts compared with their baseline scenarios. However, their effects on Ecosystem Quality, a measure of biodiversity health, are more heterogeneous. Most initiatives generated co-benefits for both climate and biodiversity, particularly those related to groups of incentives based on energy efficiency, low-carbon mobility, logistics sobriety, and material circularity. Conversely, five initiatives reduced greenhouse gas emissions while increasing preedicted impacts on ecosystem quality, mainly due to higher land-use pressures. These trade-offs are especially visible in some sustainable packaging initiatives, where material substitution reduced climate impacts but shifted part of the environmental burden towards biodiversity-related categories.
The study concludes that low-carbon initiatives cannot be assumed to be automatically beneficial for biodiversity. The impacts of carbon-reducing initiatives on biodiversity depend on the technical choices involved, the materials substituted, the physical flows reduced, and the supply chains affected. A multi-criteria LCIA approach is therefore essential to move beyond carbon-centred assessments and support corporate
