Talk by corsus at dialogue workshop on biodiversity

On 25 March 2025, Tönnies Forschung held a dialogue workshop in Badbergen on ‘Biodiversity and livestock farming: where are the levers?’. Dr Ulrike Eberle, Managing Director of corsus, was invited to give a talk on biodiversity management.

After the participants were welcomed by Prof Dr Hans-Joachim Bätza, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Tönnies Forschung, and a brief round of introductions, Thomas Muchow, Managing Director of the Rheinische Kulturlandschaft Foundation, spoke about the challenges and conflicting goals of biodiversity and livestock farming. Prof Dr Valentin H. Klaus from Ruhr University Bochum followed with a presentation on ‘Levers for biodiversity-promoting cattle grazing’. They discussed various measures that can be integrated into the agricultural management of grassland in order to reconcile biodiversity conservation and agricultural interests. An important message was that grazing and grassland management can make valuable contributions to the protection and promotion of biodiversity.

Before the discussion round started to derive new research questions, Dr Ulrike Eberle concluded the lecture round with her presentation on ‘How can biodiversity impacts be managed along the value chain?’. She emphasised how important it is to integrate the management of impacts on biodiversity into sustainability management, as the protection and promotion of biodiversity is at least as important as combating climate change.

In her presentation, she introduced the various management tools that were developed and tested in the BioVal research project and summarised in the practical handbook for biodiversity management in the food industry. In particular, she discussed the BVI method, a method for estimating the impact on biodiversity from life cycle assessment, which corsus has already applied in various projects, for example in the calculation of the biodiversity footprint of the German diet on behalf of WWF Germany.

This was followed by an exciting and lively discussion about the presentations and where further research is needed to make livestock farming more biodiversity-friendly.

Thank you for organising an interesting exchange!