A recently published working paper by the EU Business @ Biodiversity Platform, overviews the impact of businesses with agricultural supply chains on biodiversity. These businesses depend on and impact biodiversity, both directly through their activities and indirectly through their supply chains.
The paper highlights the business needs for improving the measurement of impacts and dependencies on biodiversity by companies with agricultural supply chains, the challenges faced and the potential solutions.
The six main challenges faced by companies attempting to measure their relationship with biodiversity are:
- Lack of capacity and understanding to implement existing measurement approaches;
- Lack of approaches to measure impacts directly and heavy reliance on proxies;
- Lack of evidence of application;
- Lack of access to biodiversity data by business;
- Few measurement approaches to track targets;
- Difficulty interpreting and aggregating results.
The report identified an initial set of solutions: (1) alignment across existing approaches, (2) guidance on how to navigate through those approaches were identified as the most pressing solutions, (3) training on how to use the different methods and (4) improved data availability.
Specifically, Annex 2 provides the overview of biodiversity measurement approaches and resources used to measure biodiversity impacts for businesses with agricultural supply chains.