November 2018: The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has published a paper on the process of development and use of biodiversity indicators in business. The publication is designed to help businesses integrate biodiversity into their activities by showing them where to start and how to identify existing indicators that could help measure and track their biodiversity performance.
The publication titled, ‘The Development and Use of Biodiversity Indicators in Business: an Overview,’ is aimed at businesses and practitioners already involved in the development of biodiversity indicators that are being created to provide context around the additional business applications where biodiversity indicators may be required for current or future business needs. The paper also targets businesses only starting their journey in exploring their impacts and dependencies on biodiversity.
The paper offers a logical series of steps to develop robust and reliable biodiversity indicators.
The publication notes that, while a variety of biodiversity indicators, tools, and guidance documents exist for businesses that address many specific business contexts, “what is missing is a big picture perspective and process to navigate the variety of business contexts where indicators are relevant.” To address these needs, the paper introduces an overarching process, which acknowledges the full spectrum of business applications in order to help businesses seeking to use existing indicators or embark on developing their own to measure their biodiversity performance.
The proposed process, the text explains, has many similarities with business decision-making frameworks, and offers a logical series of steps to work through in order to develop robust and reliable biodiversity indicators. The process emphasizes that indicators should always be built into larger management processes and that initial scoping phases are critical for indicator development, answering questions that clarify the business application for indicator use, such as why, what, when, for who, how often, and how detailed.
The paper also introduces a spectrum of business applications for biodiversity indicators. This spectrum outlines four prominent scopes for business applications of biodiversity indicators, which range from site- and corporate-level assessments of biodiversity performance to third-party biodiversity performance assessment. [Publication: The Development and Use of Biodiversity Indicators in Business: an Overview]