Biodiversity is the next global challenge

Our planet’s life support systems are under increasing pressure. Biodiversity – the variety of all life on the planet – is essential for our food, water, and all other natural resources. In addition to these threats, biodiversity loss also poses serious risks for companies.

That means protecting biodiversity is the next environmental challenge that needs global attention. This is already recognized by many, including policy makers. For businesses, that means it’s important to start planning your biodiversity assessment strategy now. Because without nature, society cannot thrive.

How you can embrace biodiversity assessment

Biodiversity assessment is a very broad topic, and there are many ways PRé can help you. We can look at the impact of individual products and your company as a whole. We have also developed a methodology to assess the impact of financial investments you make on biodiversity.

Product biodiversity assessment

Assessing the biodiversity impact of individual products is a powerful way to improve your product development, strategic planning and marketing. It can help companies be conscious of biodiversity in material selection and design and can even inform policy.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an established, science-based method that is also excellent for biodiversity assessment on the product level. With LCA, we can assess the biodiversity impacts of all life cycle stages: raw material extraction, manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal.

Corporate biodiversity footprint

You can also assess your biodiversity impact on a corporate level, to gain insight in risks and opportunities and find the key drivers of your biodiversity impact. Whether your biodiversity goal is to reduce your impact or even become net positive, a corporate footprint helps you monitor your progress and report and communicate credibly. A corporate biodiversity footprint includes resource use, energy use and purchases.

Biodiversity footprint for financial institutions

The financial sector plays a key role in driving positive change towards more sustainable societies. Like many other financial institutions, you probably already weigh environmental, social and governance (ESG) data in your lending and investment decisions. With the biodiversity footprint for financial institutions (BFFI), you can add biodiversity to that list.

With a biodiversity assessment through BFFI, you can calculate the biodiversity impact of individual investments and use it as an investment criterion. You can also evaluate and manage the risks of biodiversity impact and ecosystem service dependency of your investment. And, of course, the BFFI helps you monitor and report on your investment portfolio’s biodiversity footprints.