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News article16 December 2022Directorate-General for Environment

Fourth update report on biodiversity measurement approaches is now available

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© Ray Hennessy, Unsplash

The rapidly evolving landscape of tools, metrics and frameworks to measure and value the impacts and dependencies of business on biodiversity and ecosystem services, illustrates how biodiversity measurement is gaining traction among the business community. Faced with multiple approaches and based on requests from its members, the EU B@B Platform started a critical and constructive assessment of a of biodiversity measurement approaches in 2018. The fourth update report in the “Assessment of Biodiversity Measurement Approaches for Businesses and Financial Institutions” series is now available.

                                                       Read the report here

The fourth Update Report builds on previous editions and aims to support business and financial institutions to navigate the complex landscape of biodiversity measurement approaches. The report describes 29 approaches, with various maturity levels ranging from pilots to operational approaches. The approaches described are either new or updated by the tool developers. In this context, the Platform brings much need clarification and independent assessment in order to facilitate the uptake by business.

The fourth Update Report includes three main updates and additions:

  • Update on biodiversity and ecosystem services measurement approaches
  • Update of the Biodiversity Measurement Navigation Wheel published in the third Update Report of 2021.
  • Link to the Align project, funded by the European Commission, and the recently published recommendations setting out the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of biodiversity measurement and valuation.  

The Biodiversity Measurement Navigation Wheelprovides a pragmatic decision framework to select the most suitable measurement approaches for a specific business context. It is underpinned by a range of criteria and tables that provide information about the key features of the measurement approaches. The range of criteria has now been expanded with a sector criterion (as some measurement tools are restricted to one specific sector).

Furthermore, new in this Report  are the included ecosystem services measurement approaches, which complement the list of updated and newly added biodiversity measurement approaches.

Finally, this report attempts to illustrate the recently published Align recommendations with specific examples of measurement approaches that would be compliant with the ‘good’ and ‘best’ practice criteria provided by Align.”

 

Details

Publication date
16 December 2022
Author
Directorate-General for Environment