Explore the resources below to assist in completing this action.
Biodiversity Guidance action 5.2.3
5.2.3 Identify how you will measure impact drivers and/or dependencies
To measure an impact driver and or dependency, you need to determine the type of data required. Many data sources exist and are described in detail within the Protocol (page 60). To measure biodiversity impact drivers and/or dependencies, there are generally two forms of data to consider acquiring and/or collecting. Each is described below with examples.
Primary data:
- Internal business data
- Site-level impact driver data collected through field surveys and sampling
- Data collected from suppliers or customers
Secondary data:
- Published, peer-reviewed, and grey literature (for example, life-cycle impact assessment (LCIA) databases; industry, government, or internal reports)
- Estimates derived using modeling techniques, including:
- Environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) models. Many EEIO initiatives exist, including the commonly used EXIOBASE, EORA and GTAP.
- Productivity models
- Mass balance models
- Past natural capital assessments
Data collection techniques are highly variable and often dependent on location, project, and area of the value chain being assessed. For this reason, one technique may not be practical or well suited across multiple applications (however techniques should be compatible to ensure consistency and comparability as far as possible). For example, a site-level project (e.g., an environmental assessment for a prospective mine) may involve habitat surveys to assess area of habitat that would be lost, whereas data collection for a wholesaler looking at impact drivers related to commodity sourcing may require information provided by individual farmers through a survey. Both techniques result in the collection of primary data.
Data should be collected and organized in a consistent manner, so that the various data collected are compatible with each other and with the scope of analysis, and are easily comparable, shareable, and interoperable across sites, countries, time, and organizations (where applicable). Users should consider how impact driver data, and the various assessments undertaken, may need to be compared over time when selecting data and methods that are compatible.
The Protocol provides more detail on the limitations and considerations when collecting and using primary or secondary data to measure impact drivers. This includes the use of intermediate indicators (see table 5.6 in the Protocol).
For examples of business activities and their associated impact drivers, indicators, and data sources required, refer to table 5.2. This also includes important considerations on data gaps and related uncertainties.
Activity | Impact driver | Quantitative indicator | Data source | Example data gaps and key issues to consider |
Site-level impact: mining for ore | Land-use change (i.e., habitat loss) | Hectares of habitat lost | Primary data: Direct collection | Need to determine physical boundaries for site. Determine if cumulative effects are being included. |
Water use | Volume of water used annually | Primary data: Direct collection | Need to consider timescales. For example, land-use change is likely to occur primarily during project construction, whereas water use will continue on an annual basis and require repeated surveys. | |
Water pollutants (i.e., tailing ponds) | Tons of deleterious chemicals released to surface water | Primary data: Direct collection | Need to determine physical boundaries of where water pollutant assessment will occur. Need to consider which pollutants will be assessed and the local (i.e., regional or national) water quality assessment guidelines that will used. | |
Product-level impact: manufacturing leather shoes | Direct exploitation (i.e., species lost from sourcing materials) | Quantity of leather sourced per year (measured by weight or volume of materials purchased) | Secondary data: Global datasets | Consider parts of the value chain being assessed (upstream, downstream, and/or direct impacts). Will rely on proxy data to understand impact driver through the supply chain. |
Pollution (i.e., wastewater from production plant) | Tons of deleterious chemicals released to surface water | Primary data: Direct collection | Need to determine physical boundary of assessment (i.e.,over what geographic area of direct operations will impacts and dependencies be considered). Need to determine time period when field work will be completed, and number of repeat measurements necessary. | |
Water use | Volume of water used annually | Primary data: Direct collection | Need to consider area of the value chain being assessed (upstream, direct operations, and/or downstream). If unable to collect direct data from manufacturing facility, may rely on secondary data (i.e., proxy or modeled data) based on size of the company. | |
Portfolio-/sector-level impact: food production | Land-use change (i.e., biodiversity footprint of a food industry portfolio) | Hectares of land converted to monoculture | Secondary data: Public data (annual reports), private databases (fee required), and internal data collected (at global level) | Data likely come from multiple sources and in multiple formats requiring heavy data pre-treatments. Transforming multiple datasets into the same format is generally completed by experts. Different levels of confidence may result for different aspects of the data. |
GHG emissions (e.g., from land-use change or fertilizer use) | Volume of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted into the atmosphere | Secondary data: Global datasets | Need to consider part of the value chain being assessed (i.e.,. upstream, downstream emissions associated with product). May rely on modeled data for some aspects of operations if direct measurements are not available. | |
Marine ecosystem use (e.g., shellfish grown in terrestrial-based aquaculture facility) | Area of aquaculture used to grow blue mussels | Primary data: Direct collection | Availability of approaches for measuring impacts and dependencies on marine ecosystem use are currently limited. |
In the case of a business’s dependencies on biodiversity, once these are identified they will need to be measured in a standardized way. Currently, changes to the stocks (i.e., the impacts on biodiversity) and flows (i.e., impacts to ecosystem services) are relatively well understood. However, the relationship between stocks and flows are poorly understood and hard for businesses to quantify.
There are some tools such as ENCORE (focused on identifying impact and dependency pathways for financial institutions), LIFE (applicable at all Organizational Focuses), InVest, and ARIES, which identify relevant ecosystem services for business activities. Currently, standardized corporate measurement approaches to quantify biodiversity dependencies are very limited and this is an area which will require innovation. Meanwhile, you can use the approach of the Natural Capital Protocol to incorporate dependencies on biodiversity as part of your assessment.