Update 2 Report on Assessment of Biodiversity Measurement Approaches for Business and Financial Institutions coming soon – first results available!

In light of the growing interest in natural capital accounting (NCA) and a clear demand for methodologies for including ecosystems and biodiversity into NCA, a wide range of initiatives have been launched to develop pragmatic biodiversity metrics for businesses and FIs. Faced with these 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. This assessment exercise is updated annually. Updates might consist of the inclusion of additional approaches in the assessment, adaptations of the assessment methodology to reflect new developments, descriptions of case studies, etc. The Update 1 Report is available here.

The focus of the Update 2 Report is on identifying common ground amongst these approaches with the final objective to support businesses and FI in selecting a biodiversity measurement approach that fits best in their specific business context. The Report is based on a thorough analysis of 12 biodiversity measurement approaches, both technical workshops by the Aligning Biodiversity Measures for Business (ABMB) and the feedback from the discussions during the European Business   Nature Summit in Madrid on 7   8 November 2019 . A first result is the classification of approaches according to the type of business applications they can support, which might ultimately result in a decision tree allowing users to select the most suitable biodiversity tools and metrics for their specific needs and management decisions they wish to inform. See the mapping overview, which is a condensed version of an extensive mapping exercise. More context will be provided in the report. This matrix is draft for review and discussion with developers.

The report is a partnership with the ABMB initiative - led by the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) with support from the Boticario Group Foundation. ABMB is a collaboration with over twenty organisations with expertise in corporate biodiversity measurement approaches. It aims to form a common view amongst key stakeholders on the measurement, monitoring and disclosure of corporate biodiversity impact and dependencies and to build on this to help integrate more credible and comprehensive indicators of corporate contribution to global biodiversity goals into corporate reporting and global policy frameworks. The EU B@B Platform co-hosted an initial technical workshop in Brussels in March 2019 with ABMB, and delivered support in the preparation of a second workshop in October 2019 in Rio de Janeiro.