Explore the resources below to assist in completing this action.
Biodiversity Guidance action 4.2.1
4.2.1 List potentially material impacts/dependencies
Once you have set the objectives of your assessment and completed your initial scoping actions, you should complete a materiality assessment. Throughout this process, it is important to remember that:
- The value of biodiversity in providing ecosystem services may be hidden and so may not initially be identified as material to a business.
- Impacts on biodiversity affect dependencies (i.e., impacts on biodiversity may also reduce the flow of ecosystem services supporting business operations).
- Impacts may appear more material when focusing on societal value as growing concern over biodiversity loss may result in greater regulation and greater consumer pressure.
The first stage of a materiality assessment is to identify impact and dependency pathways, in order to later prioritize which are material. Impact pathways describe how, as a result of a specific business activity, a particular impact driver results in changes in natural capital and how these changes impact different stakeholders. A dependency pathway shows how a particular business activity depends upon a specific component of natural capital. An example for a biodiversity dependency might be a coffee farm’s dependence on the pollination of its coffee plants to yield coffee beans (see figure 4.1). This pollination service is reliant on a variety of species and ecosystem processes (e.g., plants supplying nectar supporting the pollinators). In this way, the coffee production process is reliant on habitats rich in biodiversity.
![](https://capitalscoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-1024x644.png)
Similarly, businesses may impact on biodiversity which in turn can affect dependencies. Impact pathways begin with a specific impact driver. An impact driver is a measurable quantity of a natural resource that is used as an input to production, or a measurable non-product output of a business activity. Using pollination for coffee plantations as an example, clearing a measurable area of land (impact driver) for agricultural conversion can reduce the species richness (biodiversity impact) within pollinator-supporting habitats, thereby increasing the risk of reduced crop productivity and disrupting the coffee production process (business value).