Biodiversity data & corporate sustainability: From a lose-lose to a win-win situation or from the drawers to databases

Biodiversity data such as occurrence of species or habitats are a fundamental feature to assess and evaluate impacts of economic activities on biodiversity, one of the basis for sustainable strategies in companies. One persistent barrier to improving natural capital accounting and place-based assessments of corporate impacts and dependencies on nature is the perceived high cost of obtaining high-quality biodiversity data.

An unknown but likely huge amount of relevant biodiversity data are actually in the hands of those who need better data now: companies. Yet biodiversity is measured daily, across the globe, in countless contexts, often privately funded through site surveys, environmental impact assessments, and compliance with nature protection laws. Since decades companies have to assess biodiversity via these often mandatory reporting activities. These valuable data are mostly not publicly accessible, not supporting the enrichment of a jagged biodiversity data matrix. While corporate reporting requirements such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and biodiversity credit schemes (e.g. the UK’s Biodiversity Net Gain) are now generating unprecedented volumes of new biodiversity data, much of it remains outside public repositories despite existing infrastructure and data-sharing standards.

This lack of open access (and missing interoperability) has two critical consequences: (1) society forfeits valuable opportunities to monitor, understand and model biodiversity change, track progress towards the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), and refine conservation strategies; and (2) companies lose access to higher-quality in situ datasets for verification, benchmarking, and the establishment of robust counterfactuals in sustainability reporting. 

In this presentation I’m presenting some examples of a surprisingly scarce species occurrence data matrix. I’m showing why improving data availability is highly needed to improve existing data and models, which were created to overcome data gaps, to support e.g. sustainability footprint analyses. We discuss which workflows might need to be developed to mobilize these important data, leading to a win-win situation for companies and the public in the light of improving sustainability and potential mandatory CSRD reporting efforts.