In light of the growing interest in natural capital accounting (NCA) and a clear demand for methodologies for including biodiversity into NCA, a wide range of initiatives have been launched to develop pragmatic biodiversity metrics for businesses and financial institutions. Faced with multiple approaches and based on requests from its members, the EU Business @ Biodiversity Platform (EU B@B Platform) started a critical and constructive assessment of a sample of biodiversity measurement approaches developed for or by businesses and FIs in 2018.

The focus of this report is on identifying common ground amongst biodiversity measurement approaches with the final objective to support businesses and FI in selecting an approach that best fits their specific business context. The Report is based on a thorough analysis of 12 biodiversity measurement approaches, technical workshops by the Aligning Biodiversity Measures for Business initiative and feedback from the discussions during the European Business and Nature Summit in Madrid on 7 and 8 November 2019. The report Annexes are available here.

A key outcome of this year’s update of the assessment report is a classification of measurement approaches according to the type of business applications they can support. This will ultimately result in a decision tree allowing business users to select the most suitable biodiversity tools and metrics for their specific needs and management decisions they wish to inform (Section 3). Important steps forward towards convergence of approaches have been made in the fields of defining boundaries, baselines and reference states (Section 4), collecting data and identifying suitable metrics (Section 5) and finally reporting and disclosure (Section 6).

The 2019 report is a partnership with the Aligning Biodiversity Measures for Business initiative - led by the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) with support from the Boticario Group Foundation. The Update 1 Report is available here.

So far, only measurement approaches have been assessed. In 2020 the Update 3 Report will for the first time include an assessment of case studies resulting from these biodiversity measurement approaches.