Biodiversity footprinting

A company’s sphere of influence goes well beyond the factory gates or office door. Being able to assess and prioritise the impacts of a business across its entire value chain is an essential step towards understanding the true effects on nature and knowing where reliance on biodiversity occurs. Ensuring that upstream supply chain and downstream (distribution and products) impacts are fully examined in addition to your direct operations can be complicated. We can illustrate the full biodiversity footprint of your value chain using a suite of biodiversity data and from a thorough understanding of your business. We use a range of metrics including the International Union for Conservation of Nature guidelines for planning and monitoring corporate biodiversity performance, various industry-specific metrics and bespoke tools.

The Nature Positive team will assess your direct operations and sites via biodiversity baselining to provide you with your direct biodiversity footprint. This is a great starting point; however, as your company is partly responsible for what your consumers do with your products, we recommend going further. In addition to the baseline of your direct operations, our complete biodiversity footprinting service includes a supply chain analysis to reveal your upstream impacts and dependencies on nature, and looks downstream to assess the impact of your end products in how they are used and their end of life.

By the end of this footprinting process, you will have a complete picture of your relationship and dependencies on nature. The Nature Positive team will inform you of the best next steps to reduce or mitigate your impacts and identify opportunities to de-risk your supply chain and operations. Steps might include engaging your supply chain about best practices for particular raw materials, adapting the processes at your manufacturing plant to lessen your direct impacts on the surrounding biodiversity, or changing the materials your product is made from to be more readily recyclable. Completing a biodiversity footprint is the gold standard in safeguarding your business from biodiversity-related risks and will enable your company to become a sustainability leader.

If you are interested in finding out more about how biodiversity footprinting can help you understand your current impact on nature, please contact the team at Nature Positive.