Biodiversity Evaluation Strategies

“Biodiversity cannot be measured with a single metric like CO2-eq!” How many times have I heard this sentence and observed the same debate replayed afterwards? Well, yes, but what “biodiversity” should be measured then? This excellent chart summarizes what elements of biodiversity should be measured, lists metrics for each and also provides insights into how so-called “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches can be used.   The chart packs a lot of very powerful messages. How to read it?   🔎 Let’s start at its centre: it describes What should be measured and gives one example of Metrics for each element: 👉 Biodiversity state, as defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) UN Biodiversity: 1️⃣ Ecosystem, which for business is split into condition - measured for instance in #MeanSpeciesAbundance or MSA (see my newsletter on the issue: https://t.ly/eJ2dn) - and extent   2️⃣ Genes, which currently lack proper corporate metrics   3️⃣ Species, usually measured using STAR units   👉 Biodiversity significance: the non-exhaustive list highlights the most important elements, also building from the CBD’s Global Biodiversity Framework 1️⃣ Species risk of extinction: as well as being part of biodiversity state, it is linked to its importance   2️⃣ Protected areas (PA)   3️⃣ Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA): corporate impacts are usually measured in overlap with numbers of both PA and KBA (or directly in hectares of overlap)   4️⃣ Ecosystem services Then how to measure it? ⬇ Top-down approaches work with limited data such as country of operation, turnover or purchases and combine them with national averages or models such as EXIOBASE and GLOBIO. They are appropriate for screening for instance.   ⬆ Bottom-up approaches can usually refine such screenings by aggregating assessments based on site-level data up to the corporate level. They include very different approaches with varying coverage and limitations: direct biodiversity state measurement, pressure-based modelling (e.g. through GLOBIO), and secondary layers & datasets on biodiversity state & significance (e.g. IBAT).   I am very proud of this chart and I hope it will help clarify a lot of discussions! I had started thinking about it a while ago and it converged with parallel thinking at CDC Biodiversité’s so we worked together to include it in its biodiversity footprint finance team’s latest report.   I added a wink at one of our first brainstorming sessions with Violette Pradère and Emma Godefroy on p.2 of the document: at first I saw the chart as an hourglass but quickly a more poetic vision emerged and we started calling it the “butterfly” chart as its top-down and bottom-up parts could be seen as the wings of a beautiful butterfly!   PS: I believe very few people actually think or say that #biodiversity should be measured with a single metric and I’m afraid raising this issue over & over again is distracting us from actually moving towards real actions and monitoring for biodiversity.

Biodiversity is reorganising at a planetary scale. A landmark Nature study by François Keck and colleagues synthesised 2,133 studies, covering nearly 98,000 impacted and reference sites across land, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. They measured three dimensions of change: local diversity, composition shifts, and homogenisation, across the five main human pressures: land use change, resource exploitation, pollution, climate change, and invasive species. The global picture is clear. Community composition changes strongly and consistently under human pressure, and local diversity declines across all biomes. Pollution and habitat change are among the most potent drivers. The long-assumed universal trend towards homogenisation is not supported; instead, its direction depends on spatial scale. Larger scales tend to show more homogenisation, while smaller scales often reveal differentiation. The authors’ findings have direct relevance for implementing the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Targets that fail to account for spatial scale risk masking real changes. Monitoring systems should track composition shifts alongside richness, and include microbial and fungal communities, which often respond earliest to pressures or restoration. In freshwater systems, this matters for places like the beautiful Shkodër Lake, walking distance from where I live, with its many endemic and threatened molluscs, fish, and water birds. Regional and local distinctiveness must be maintained alongside global targets. From my perspective, four imperatives follow. First, direct finance, procurement, and regulation toward cutting pollution and safeguarding habitat integrity. These offer the fastest ecological gains while supporting broader recovery. Second, make biodiversity monitoring scale explicit in all GBF implementation plans, financing frameworks, and corporate disclosures. Third, invest in the capacity to monitor microbial and fungal communities as early warning indicators alongside plants and animals. Fourth, include shifts in species composition, not just measures of species richness, to indicate degradation or restoration, as the total number of species at different points in time can mask significant changes in what species are present. These steps, taken together, create a pathway for policy, finance, and restoration to work with the living patterns of ecosystems, rather than chasing statistical illusions. #Biodiversity #KunmingMontrealGBF #NaturePositive #PollutionControl #EcosystemRestoration

Measuring what works in conservation Conservation has never lacked ideas. Protected areas, payments for ecosystem services, community management, certification schemes, and public campaigns have all been promoted as responses to biodiversity loss. What has often been missing is reliable knowledge about how well these interventions work, for whom, and under what conditions. A growing body of research argues that answering those questions requires moving beyond counting activities to determine whether outcomes can truly be attributed to conservation actions. Recent commentaries highlight this shift. One warns that scarce funds may be directed toward “well-intentioned but ineffective efforts” without stronger causal evidence. Another argues that biodiversity policy suffers from an “evidence problem,” with many interventions not grounded in robust research. Together, they reflect a field attempting to move from persuasion to proof. Traditional conservation monitoring tracks trends such as forest cover or species abundance. These indicators are useful but do not reveal why change occurred. A forest might remain intact because of protection, or because it lies far from roads & markets. Impact evaluation addresses this uncertainty by asking what would have happened without the intervention (the counterfactual). Because this alternative reality cannot be observed directly, researchers approximate it using comparison groups or statistical methods. Establishing causation is difficult in complex socio-ecological systems. Protected areas, for example, are rarely placed randomly; they are often located where deforestation pressure is already low. Studies that fail to account for this selection bias can overestimate effectiveness. More rigorous approaches frequently produce smaller but more credible estimates of impact. To address these challenges, conservationists increasingly borrow methods from economics & public health. Randomized controlled trials offer the strongest evidence but are often impractical or unethical. Quasi-experimental techniques attempt to construct credible counterfactuals when experiments are not feasible. No single method suits every context, and evaluation needs evolve as projects mature. Evidence gaps remain substantial. Many strategies have been studied unevenly across regions, and practitioners often lack the resources to interpret complex analyses. Institutional incentives can also discourage rigorous evaluation, as organizations may feel pressure to demonstrate success rather than uncertainty. Despite these obstacles, the emerging consensus is pragmatic. Not every project requires a randomized trial, but most benefit from a clear theory of change & systematic learning. Biodiversity loss continues at a pace that leaves little room for ineffective interventions. Determining what works will not solve the crisis on its own, but without that knowledge, even well-funded efforts risk missing their mark.

Can we use #LCA to measure a product system's impact on #biodiversity ❓ The answer is yes❗ - How reliable are these calculations? Well, that is up for discussion. The impact on biodiversity should always be measured in situ by surveying the species richness of and ecosystem and in combination with other techniques usually including local communities' knowledge. - Why do I think so? Because ecosystems are essentially unique everywhere we look, the impact of a substance emission or material extraction from nature (elementary flows) varies from region to region. It is different to perform a given activity in an urban area than in a rainforest. However, in the last decade, new Life Cycle Impact Assessment methods have been developed to account for regional differences in the impact on biodiversity. They typically focus on assessing the impacts of #landuse and land-use change, as these are among the most significant drivers of biodiversity loss. They may quantify impacts in terms of potentially disappeared fractions of species (PDF) over a certain area and time (usually m2/year) or use other metrics to estimate the change in species richness or ecosystem quality. Some of the methods that include approaches to assess biodiversity impacts are: ➖ ReCiPe: a comprehensive LCIA method that includes a model for assessing land use impacts on biodiversity through the PDF metric. It aims to quantify species loss over a certain area and time due to land use. ➖ IMPACT World+Endpoint: This method includes an attempt to integrate biodiversity impacts through several impact categories such as the PDF from freshwater acidification, damage to ecosystem quality from changes in the soil pH, marine acidification, ecotoxicity, land transformation and occupation, water pollution, and water availability. It is one of the most complete. ➖ USEtox: focused on toxicological impacts, includes considerations for ecotoxicity, which indirectly affects biodiversity by assessing the potential toxic impacts on aquatic and terrestrial species. ➖ Land use biodiversity (Chaudhary et al., 2015): recommended by the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative: "The indicator represents regional species loss taking into account the effect of land occupation displacing entirely or reducing the species that would otherwise exist on that land, the relative abundance of those species within the ecoregion, and the overall global threat level for the affected species." I love this method because includes regional factors. ➖ Global Biodiversity Score (GBS): not a traditional LCIA method, GBS is a tool developed to help companies assess their impact on biodiversity. Using a common metric, it translates pressures from organizational activities into impacts on biodiversity. We need to think way beyond #carbonfootprint to aim for a #sustainable world. Biodiversity loss is that issue that although highly interlinked with #climatechange, is the actual major environmental issue we face.

Are you interested in a quick and easy way to measure the biodiversity impacts of farming? This week, we publish a paper that describes the methods behind the Cool Farm Biodiversity metric – a farm-scale biodiversity assessment tool that scores how well farms are supporting their local biodiversity. https://lnkd.in/ghPezhvn The software is freely available online, written in farmer-friendly language and easy to use (https://lnkd.in/gPTWkFSg). It is designed to be global in scope, with versions currently available for temperate forest and Mediterranean and semi-arid biomes, and a tropical forest version on the way (a little more funding required). Question and answer options, and groups of species given individual scores, are decided in consultation with a ‘stakeholder and user group’ for each biome. The metric reports areas of different habitats within a farm, including overall percentage of natural habitat, which some are interpreting as ‘ecological integrity’. It can be used to find out which additional actions would most likely enhance farmland biodiversity. The farm scale is important, because it’s the scale at which change can happen, incentivised by supply chains and markets, but implemented by farmers, farm managers and advisors. Scores are based on the Conservation Evidence database (https://lnkd.in/ga5mmgf4), so actions scientifically proven to work get more points. Please read the paper – it’s fully open access under a CC BY licence, which means anyone can use any part of it, for anything. Find out more about why and how the Cool Farm Biodiversity metric takes the approach it does, try the metric online and let us know what you think. The full set of question & answer options, scores and links to underlying evidence are available to download as a supplementary file, which also includes a list of the best-scoring practices for each species group in each biome. You can find out which evidence-based conservation actions you can do to help woodland birds on your farm. Or beneficial insects. Or soil fauna. 23 species groups were selected for inclusion in the metric across the two biomes, and there are more to come. If you want to find out even more, come along to the Cool Farm Alliance Annual Meeting https://lnkd.in/gqDBncXe

- Can we track the biodiversity impacts of an entire sector using ONE NUMBER? - If we do so, and develop a #NaturePositive strategy on that basis, how do we avoid PERVERSE OUTCOMES for biodiversity? Both very important questions in relation to contemporary conservation strategy and biodiversity disclosure. Here, we consider them in the first part of our #biodiversityfootprint #NetPositive work for #DuurzameZuivelketen (the Dutch sustainable dairy chain, see https://lnkd.in/eRY6CM-9), which is now available online. We outline a method for calculating an integrated biodiversity impact metric, based on extensive farm environmental pressure data (reported against https://lnkd.in/e_BPstZ3), and using #LifeCycleAssessment approaches. Then - crucially - we outline quantitative ecological and social 'safeguards' that seek to ensure any journey towards Net Positive impact for biodiversity, measured using that index, does NOT result in perverse outcomes. Check out Part 1 here: https://lnkd.in/eVrGpQdq And watch this space for Part 2! Isobel Taylor Joseph Poore Talitha Bromwich Brian Shaw Anne de Valença

🌿 🦋 NEW PAPER ON BIODIVERSITY FOOTPRINTING Key take-aways: ♻️ 🌎 Taking a whole lifecycle approach for assessing business biodiversity impacts is important, as substantial impacts can often be embedded within organisational value chains. 📅 ⛏️ 🪓 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a powerful approach to help organisations understand the impacts of company activities on biodiversity, covering all stages of a product’s life cycle and capturing many pressures that impact biodiversity. ❓ 🌵 🐦 But how do the ‘biodiversity footprint’ estimates from these tools relate to biodiversity impacts on the ground? What are the major assumptions and sources of uncertainty in these approaches? And how do these uncertainties influence the design of strategies to mitigate impacts? 😕 ❓ Modelling complex value chains and impact pathways necessarily means big assumptions are made in assessments. This means LCAs carry substantial uncertainties, which are often poorly understood and communicated in results. These uncertainties arise from the structure of the models (such as which biodiversity threats are included), the quality and completeness of the underlying data, decisions made in assessments and the way results are presented. 🔀 If not fully appreciated, these uncertainties could influence user decision-making, potentially leading to misleading conclusions, and misallocated resources to address impacts when designing biodiversity strategies. 📃 🧭 So given these risks… how should organisations use LCAs to their full potential? In the paper we outline clear opportunities for businesses and researchers to reduce, better understand and navigate these uncertainties wherever possible. 🌳 🦁 We outline opportunities for the effective use of LCAs in biodiversity strategy design: 1) Risk screening & tracking progress: We suggest LCAs can be most effective for high-level risk screening, prioritising action, and tracking biodiversity impact reduction over time. 2) Complemented by other approaches: Once high-impact areas are identified, LCAs can be paired with more specific approaches to provide robust impact estimates and guide effective, location-specific mitigation action. 3) Cautious use & complementary metrics: LCA outputs should be interpreted carefully due to uncertainties and lack of specificity. Targets should use a basket of metrics, focusing on direct biodiversity measurements, pressure reductions, and clear conservation actions. Care should be taken when using absolute estimates of biodiversity impact from LCA’s in strategy design. If you’re interested, there is much more detail in the full paper. This was a great collaborative effort between Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science, The Biodiversity Consultancy Ltd & The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. https://lnkd.in/eqFebWZk Please do get in touch if you’d like to discuss. We’d love to hear from you.

5-step process for businesses to operationalize nature and biodiversity 🌍 Biodiversity loss is increasingly influencing enterprise risk, supply chain stability, capital access, and regulatory exposure. Many organizations now face a practical question: how to translate nature-related impacts and dependencies into decisions, targets, and actions that can be managed across the business. The Science Based Targets for Nature (SBTN) framework provides a five-step process that aligns well with established corporate planning, risk, and performance management cycles: 1️⃣ Assess Identify material impacts and dependencies on nature across operations, value chains, and geographies, supported by location-specific data. 2️⃣ Interpret & prioritize Convert assessment results into a clear set of priority issues and locations, focusing on areas with the highest exposure, risk, and ability to influence outcomes. 3️⃣ Measure, set & disclose Define baselines, set science-based targets, establish timelines, and integrate monitoring and disclosure into existing governance and reporting structures. 4️⃣ Act Implement actions using the AR³T hierarchy (avoid, reduce, restore & regenerate, transform), linking operational changes with longer-term system and value-chain shifts. 5️⃣ Track Monitor performance, verify outcomes, adjust actions as needed, and report progress in line with growing expectations from regulators, investors, and other stakeholders. This structured cycle helps connect nature-related assessment, prioritization, target setting, implementation, and disclosure into routine business processes. As nature-related risks become more location-specific and more closely examined by financial markets and policymakers, approaches like this are increasingly used to embed biodiversity into core decision-making rather than treating it as a separate sustainability exercise. Source: Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) – Science-Based Targets for Nature: Initial Guidance for Business and WWF, A Biodiversity Guide for Business (2022).

Our friends at the GRI just released a new free resource on biodiversity impacts with case studies and is a welcome move. It reinforces that biodiversity reporting has to be practical, impact-based, and useful for decision-making. GRI says GRI (standard) 101 helps organizations identify the direct drivers of biodiversity loss linked to operations and supply chains, map where impacts occur, and assess effects on ecosystems and communities. It also states plainly that “information on impacts is necessary to make decisions for change.” That is exactly why this matters to projects. If your projects are not identifying biodiversity impacts, assessing them, and creating a pathway for that information to support non-financial reporting, then your organization is only telling part of the story. The Project Management Institute GPM (Green Project Management®) P5 Standard for Sustainability in Project Management was built for this. The Free P5 Standard says it “addresses sustainability performance and impacts from a project” and provides inputs to support ESG disclosures, GRI, UNGC, and other sustainability reports. It is even more direct than that: “Most guidance on reporting requires that the organization determine material topics starting with identifying actual and potential impacts as a first step. In practice a P5 Impact Analysis accomplishes this for the project.” And our PMI-GPM reporting guidance closes the loop. The Sustainability Management Plan is supposed to include a “Sustainability Reporting Summary” describing how the project and its outcomes contribute to the organization’s sustainability strategy and are used as material for sustainability reporting. Sustainability is a project delivery issue. Get their resource here 👉 : https://lnkd.in/gt44jaFb? #GRI #Biodiversity #GRI101 #P5 #SustainabilityReporting #ESG #ProjectManagement #Materiality #Nature #PMI #GPM

Ecologists Outline Methods For Reaching Global Biodiversity Targets -- https://lnkd.in/gWB8VeCa <-- shared (2021) technical article -- https://lnkd.in/gr_UDf2j <-- shared (2021) paper -- “Nature is, in many ways, hard to measure, yet researchers have spent decades searching for ways to best quantify its health and create benchmarks for conservation… "Whether you are a farmer or an irrigator or someone that oversees a city water supply, managing a natural resource is all about measuring the conditions, so you know you're taking good care of it," said [the lead author.] The [research] publication [link above] comes ahead of talks planned for this fall among members of the Convention on Biological Diversity to create a new Global Biodiversity Framework, essentially a plan to meet biodiversity targets in the coming decades. The paper suggests new guidelines to assess the health of forest ecosystems around the world using satellite data, a method that wasn't possible even five years ago, according to Hansen… The framework outlined in the paper draws on the idea of ecosystem integrity, a measure of the quality of natural habitats. In forests, this is based on three things: forest structure, such as how tall the canopy layers rise above the ground and how dense the leaves are packed in that canopy; function of the ecosystem, how fast plants and animal populations grow and how well nutrients are cycling; and the composition of species in that ecosystem. Together, the structure, function and composition determine usefulness of that ecosystem. "It is water. It is fire. It is disaster risk. It is forests that breathe. It is fruits and nuts and wood products. It is wildlife for scenery and for consumption. It is water for agriculture," Hansen said. "Ecological integrity is all of these things." The proposed framework suggests methods to help countries monitor how ecosystems change over time and see the extent of those changes on a national and international scale. It would create a way for nations to access aerial data on land cover, productivity, fire incidence and forest extent and use that data to evaluate "essential biodiversity variables," the minimum measurements needed to determine the status of a species or ecosystem…” #GIS #spatial #mapping #remotesensing #survey #biodiversity #GBD #global #spatianalysis #spatiotemporal #GBF #framework #ecosystems #earthobservation #ecosystemintegrity #EI #climate #climatechange #evaluation #environment #forest #vegetation #trees #conservation #diversity #plant #animal #water #wildfire #model #modeling #risk #hazard #wildlife #agriculture