Businesses depend on or impact biodiversity, either directly through their activities or indirectly through their supply chains. In order to manage impacts and dependencies on biodiversity, and demonstrate improved performance, businesses and financial institutions need robust measurement approaches to understand and manage risks and leverage opportunities.

While pressure for corporate biodiversity disclosure is increasing, driven by investors, policymakers and civil society, current reporting practices on biodiversity are limited by a lack of broadly accepted measurement approaches to underpin them.

Businesses and financial institutions are increasingly being called upon to demonstrate how they are positively contributing to biodiversity challenges and feeding into societal efforts to address them (e.g. the post-2020 global biodiversity framework and the Sustainable Development Goals). While there has been some alignment around using approaches like the mitigation hierarchy to achieve no net loss or net gain performance objectives for biodiversity, there has been no uniform way for the private sector to measure progress towards these goals.

The Aligning Biodiversity Measures for Business collaboration led by UNEP-WCMC and with partners across >20 organisations convenes key stakeholders to improve clarity and build consensus on how businesses and financial institutions can measure and report on performance. The collaboration seeks to form a common view on the measurement, monitoring and disclosure of corporate impacts and dependencies on biodiversity, and then to integrate credible and comprehensive corporate measurement into external reporting/disclosure and global biodiversity policy.

The first year of the collaboration – funded by in-kind investment by collaborating partners and the Boticário Group Foundation – laid the groundwork for alignment but did not achieve alignment of methodologies in itself. To date a series of workshops (the first in Brussels in March 2019 and the second in Brazil in November 2019) and webinars have brought together developers of measurement approaches and key stakeholders to explore challenges on data, metrics, boundaries and baselines, business applications and disclosure.

This work confirmed the need for alignment between measurement approaches, a demand for clarity and standardisation from industry and set out a series of recommendations developed in conjunction with the EU B@B Platform for further action.

In 2020, information from the collaboration’s working groups was integrated into the Biodiversity Guidance to accompany the Natural Capital Protocol and the Initial Guidance for Companies on Science-Based Targets for Nature. The collaboration will also submit an Information Document to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) highlighting recommendations for Parties on how to support the private sector implement the post-2020 global biodiversity framework and launch an accompanying report on “Corporate biodiversity measurement and disclosure within the current and future global policy context”.

Looking forward the collaboration will re-convene key stakeholders to work together and identify current gaps within available corporate biodiversity measurement approaches, develop sector-specific guidance on measurement for site-based companies, supply chain companies and financial institutions, and work towards standardisation of measurement and disclosure of impacts and dependencies on nature by the private sector.

The Aligning Biodiversity Measures for Business collaboration is a broad partnership including: Actiam; Arcadis; Arizona State University; Biodiversity Disclosure Project; BirdLife; Boticário Group Foundation; Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership; CDC Biodiversité; Conservation International; Convention on Biological Diversity; Crem; Ecoasca; Endangered Wildlife Trust; EU Business @ Biodiversity Platform; Fauna & Flora International; Global Nature Fund; International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN); LIFE Institute; Natural Capital Coalition; OECD; PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency; PRé; The Biodiversity Consultancy; The Nature Conservancy; Tarkett; UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre; Wildlife Conservation Society; and ValFilm.

Many of these partners bring existing private-sector networks with which they are actively working on measurement approaches, and with whom they will consult and engage in the delivery of the collaboration’s objectives.

Phase 1 & 2 of the collaboration was funded by the Boticário Group Foundation.