Site-based industrial operations such as those within the extractive, energy and infrastructure sectors can result in a whole host of direct and indirect impacts on biodiversity within their Area of Influence (AoI). Effective biodiversity risk screening requires consideration of the full range of these impacts when deciding on buffers to apply. Unlike direct impacts, which are more obvious and therefore better studied and documented, indirect impacts are harder to capture in risk screening as they are a step removed from project operations. While direct impacts are triggered by the pressures created by project operations, indirect impacts result from the wider socio-economic and demographic changes caused by the operations, and often involve third-party actors. This brief highlights the key pathways through which indirect impacts manifest, supported by evidence from scholarly literature to form an adequate definition of indirect impacts, and outlines the wider socio-economic and demographic factors that determine indirect impacts. This brief provides a decision-making framework for incorporating indirect impacts in biodiversity risk screening, with applicability at both project-level (for businesses) and portfolio-level (for financial institutions). Direct effects are also important to consider, these are not covered here, but are addressed in a previous Proteus Technical Brief.