Context

Business and finance interest in measuring biodiversity performance is growing rapidly, driven by the need to better inform risk assessments and decision-making across industry sectors.

Over the last years, the EU Business & Biodiversity Platform has initiated an independent comparative assessment of several biodiversity measurement approaches to guide corporates in selecting the most appropriate approach according to their needs. However, measuring biodiversity performance requires biodiversity data. Collecting and interpreting biodiversity data for application in a business context is often challenging. A recent Swiss Re survey (2021) found that 70% of investors believe a lack of available data is a key barrier to making investments supporting biodiversity.

Despite the huge demand from businesses and finance institutions for more clarity on biodiversity data that are suitable for use in a business context, relatively limited guidance is available. The EU Business @ Biodiversity Platform aims to cover this gap by offering a full webinar series on biodiversity data for businesses and dedicating the next report (Update Report 4 – to be launched by 30 Nov 2021) on this topic.

Objectives and scope of the webinar series

This webinar series provides an overview of recent developments in the field of biodiversity data for businesses and financial institutions. The 3 first webinars will present examples of currently available and well-performing data sources on biodiversity impacts and dependencies, as well as innovative and promising biodiversity data collection techniques. Particular emphasis will be put on business applications, e.g. which type of internal decision-making can be supported by which data and which data collection techniques? Each of these webinars includes concrete examples on how businesses have applied biodiversity data.  The final webinar will focus on remaining challenges and invites businesses to participate in a debate on how the accessibility, infrastructure and quality of data can be improved.

The webinar series will cover the following topics:

• How to use IBAT and ENCORE? How are they linked? How is STAR linked to IBAT?
• How can remote sensing be applied as a biodiversity data source in supply chains?
• What is eDNA and how does it work? How can it help businesses in collecting and interpreting biodiversity data, both in marine, freshwater and terrestrial environments?
• How can other innovative biodiversity data collection techniques such as bioacoustics and taggers support corporate biodiversity measurement?
• Which evolutions in the field of open source biodiversity data platforms are going on?
• Are there specific approaches in the field of biodiversity data collection for financial institutions?
• Which are remaining obstacles and how could these be addressed?

Each session will provide sufficient time for Q&A.

Practical details

Webinars will take place on 12, 19, 26 and 28 October between 3:30 and 5:00 CET. Registration is mandatory. See the detailed agenda for the first webinar and the concept note for the series below.