Increasingly firms wish to map and enhance their affect on biodiversity, however that is proving tough. A brand new “biodiversity affect screening instrument” from PwC helps firms decide the fitting methods for motion.
Amid the push in the direction of a extra sustainable financial system, it has change into more and more clear that merely decreasing emissions at this stage won’t be sufficient to forestall probably the most severe impacts of worldwide warming.
To assist rebalance the planet, securing biodiversity is an important a part of the struggle. Earth’s finely tuned ecosystems assist protect the fragile steadiness that has allowed humanity to thrive in latest historic occasions – and with out them, environmental deterioration is prone to speed up.
Nonetheless, measuring carbon footprints and completely different emission perimeters is already greater than tough sufficient for almost all of firms. Even when monitoring the impacts of enterprise exercise on biodiversity weren’t as tough, it’s apparent that almost all firms have no idea the place to start out.
To assist companies deal with the biodiversity aspect of the sustainability equation, PwC launched a brand new instrument to assist organizations construct a roadmap to changing into biodiversity-friendly. The instrument helps organizations with sensible steering on the place and learn how to actually begin, visualizing what features of a enterprise have what sorts of environmental affect.
“Biodiversity is a comparatively new subject within the enterprise world. Many organizations typically wrestle to get began, partially resulting from a scarcity of knowledge, info or uniform requirements,” mentioned Jacques de Swart, mathematician and accomplice in PwC’s Advisory apply. “However accounting for biodiversity is unquestionably doable.”
The instrument takes organizations’ monetary knowledge as a place to begin. Monetary knowledge is transformed into biodiversity affect utilizing values from databases comparable to Exiobase and the ReCiPe technique.
Nynke Vries, Biodiversity Specialist at PwC, defined: “Exiobase is a worldwide and multi-regional input-output database that permits you to quantitatively determine the footprint of every product. ReCiPe makes use of life cycle evaluation to find out the environmental affect of thousands and thousands of merchandise, from the extraction of essential uncooked supplies to the disposal of waste.
PwC’s instrument then converts the affect into numbers by stress issue and KPI. “With this perception, organizations can outline the very best interventions to enhance their affect on biodiversity,” De Swart mentioned.
Buyer case
PwC has already put its new instrument to work. For the catering division of a giant group, the corporate helped scale back its adverse affect on sustainability and biodiversity. This has led to the thought, amongst different issues, that offering avocados has a extra adverse affect on stress elements than offering tomatoes to clients.
The catering staff makes use of dozens of those concepts to craft an optimum menu, balancing buyer tastes with affect on sustainability and biodiversity.
The Massive 4 additionally contribute their biodiversity experience to the UK Division for Atmosphere, Meals and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Earlier in 2022, DEFRA selected PwC as fund supervisor for its £100m Biodiversity Panorama Fund, which helps administer supply accomplice competitions, handle and monitor grants, coordinate fund-wide studying and supply associated providers.
With the intention to successfully fulfill its position, PwC should be capable to monitor and assess the impacts of enterprise operations on biodiversity, with the knowledge from its new instrument including worth to its work.
Follow what you preach
“This info is essential,” mentioned Wineke Haagsma, sustainability director at PwC within the Netherlands. “We ourselves use the instrument for our personal group with a purpose to higher perceive the affect of the corporate’s decisions on biodiversity. This info permits us to make extra sustainable decisions, not solely with regard to the local weather but additionally to nature.
