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Aims

Businesses, finance institutions and other large organisations are increasingly interested in monitoring their biodiversity footprint. This can be a very complex task. It requires finding a method that considers their range of operations across different geographical locations, and that captures the direct and indirect impacts on biodiversity through their supply chains.

This work aims to:

• • Develop a standardised, methodologically robust approach based on the Life Cycle Assessment framework to assess the biodiversity impacts of large organisations
  • Decrease the time needed from large organisations to account for their biodiversity footprints, by developing a method using the greenhouse gas protocol datasets already collected for organisations
  • Explore the feasibility of this approach for monitoring and reporting biodiversity impacts.

Approach

Global and national businesses and other large organisations are increasingly aware of how the interactions between biodiversity and the market might pose a risk for their future operations; there is therefore a growing interest in assessing their impacts on biodiversity. It’s not easy! It is a fast-changing, competitive space, with a bewildering array of tools – not all of them based on robust methods. That’s why the RENEW team is working with partners to develop a structured and systematic method to quantify biodiversity impacts for a whole organisation.

We have been developing a method that uses the data businesses are collecting for carbon and sustainability accounting to quantify biodiversity impacts as well. Using readily available data makes this method easier for businesses to adopt. Activities vary depending on the type of organisation, but our method incorporates energy consumption, travel, transport, water consumption and waste management.

Initial screening analysis provides a heatmap of the organisation’s biodiversity impact. This allows them to identify ‘red spots’, the activities where they have the biggest impact. This can help to prioritise and inform decisions about how and where to intervene to reduce negative biodiversity impacts. The team are also exploring how to assess positive impacts on biodiversity resulting from conservation and restoration activities. Unlike carbon, however, biodiversity can be measured in many ways and is not fungible: the value of ‘a unit’ of biodiversity changes according to its spatial context. Concepts such as ‘net zero’ for carbon therefore do not readily translate to biodiversity.

Life Cycle Assessment: an internationally standardised method which evaluates the environmental impacts of a product, process or service over the entire life cycle, from raw materials extraction and processing right through to use, repair and disposal.

Biodiversity footprint: Quantification of the environmental impacts on biodiversity resulting from the activities of a project or an organisation, of a product or service. It includes the modelling of the resources used and emissions in the supply chain.

Drivers of biodiversity loss: The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment defined five main drivers of biodiversity loss: 1) Habitat loss and degradation, 2) climate change, 3) excessive nutrient load and other forms of pollution, 4) overexploitation and unsustainable use, and 5) invasive alien species.

Next Steps

We are trialling the approach with three organisations initially. We also aim to explore how this approach could be aligned with other related targets and frameworks. These include the Science-Based Targets initiative (which recommends that companies’ first step should be to assess their environmental impact) or a nature-related risk and opportunity assessment using the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures  framework.