What Data is Needed to Assess a Company’s Impact on Biodiversity?
What data is needed to assess a company’s impact on Biodiversity?
“Biodiversity analysis is a complex task. It requires access to relevant data, but companies lack transparency on the subject—especially since the entire value chain should be covered.”
— Elouan Heurard, ESG Analyst Specializing in Biodiversity at Candriam
Co-founded by Candriam within the think tank “2030, Investir Demain”, the working group dedicated to biodiversity aims to develop a granular and comprehensive approach to biodiversity analysis over the coming months, integrating location-based impact considerations. Here, we present the key takeaways from our first workshop.
The assessment of biodiversity-related impacts and dependencies requires a dual approach: a local perspective, focused on the ecological context surrounding a production site, and a global perspective, to fully grasp biodiversity challenges in a world of globalized value chains.
In this context, several critical questions arise:
- How can we assess impacts and dependencies at a local level?
- How can a company’s biodiversity impact be represented?
- How should this impact be interpreted within its ecological context (water risks, forest biomes, protected areas)?
- And finally, how can we obtain the relevant data needed for such an analysis?
Identifying Production Sites
Access to reliable data is a key challenge, and one that is particularly complex. The first major obstacle is the lack of corporate transparency. In certain industries—such as mining, cement, or steel production—manufacturing sites are relatively easy to identify using geolocation tools and regulatory environmental constraints. However, other industries, such as chemical production or finished goods manufacturing, are not subject to the same transparency obligations.
While technical solutions like web-scraping (automated data extraction from the web) can help bridge this gap, regulatory measures requiring corporate disclosure would be far more effective. This is precisely the approach advocated by the TNFD’s LEAP framework (Locate, Evaluate, Assess, and Prepare), which promotes standardized environmental reporting.
Tracing Back the Supply Chain
Obtaining relevant data becomes even more challenging when assessing a company’s biodiversity impact across its entire value chain. The further upstream one looks in the supply chain, the more complex the analysis becomes.
This is largely due to technical barriers. In the agri-food industry, for example, the agricultural supply chain is not easily pinpointed on a map. Some supply chains, like palm oil plantations, can be mapped as discrete points, but others—such as soybean or wheat farming—are spread over vast areas, making location-based analysis much more difficult.
Additionally, corporate transparency remains a major roadblock. While certain commodities—such as palm oil, soy, and cocoa—are traceable due to the EU’s anti-deforestation regulations, others, such as almonds or dairy products, remain largely untracked, despite their significant environmental impact.
The Challenge of Mapping Production Networks
Beyond collecting data, accurately representing and interpreting it within its ecological context is a significant challenge for assessing a company’s biodiversity impact.
Several key questions remain unanswered:
- How can we map an industrial group’s production network, accounting for manufacturing sites, plantations, trade flows, and their respective impacts on forests, water resources, indigenous communities, and protected areas?
- What mapping methodologies are most relevant when the final output needs to be expressed as a binary decision (In/Out), a sustainability score, or a company comparison?
The findings from our Biodiversity Working Group will aim to provide practical insights, helping investors integrate geographic impact considerations into their assessment of corporate sustainability.
Opinion piece by Elouan Heurard, ESG Analyst at Candriam.
