(C15.5) Does your organization use biodiversity indicators to monitor performance across its activities?
Change from last year
New question
Rationale
Robust indicators are critical for a corporate-level assessment of biodiversity impact, by allowing the aggregation of data from different activities and geographies. This question allows an organisation to demonstrate its use of indicators to track progress against its biodiversity goals and objectives and evaluate the success of its intervention/s. Your response to this question aligns with requirements of “Stage 3: Indicators” in IUCN’s Guidelines for planning and monitoring corporate biodiversity performance, which recommends that companies collect, share and analyse biodiversity data that encourages learning and improvement.
Connection to other frameworks
SDG
Goal 12: Responsible consumption and production
Response options
Please complete the following table:
| Does your organization use indicators to monitor biodiversity performance? | Indicators used to monitor biodiversity performance |
|---|---|
Select from:
| Select all that apply:
|
Requested content
Indicators used to monitor biodiversity performance (column 2)
- Select:
- State and Benefit indicators: for state indicators focusing on improving habitats and species and benefit indicators that monitor ecosystem services goals.
- Pressure indicators: for pressure indicators that are effective for tracking objectives. For example, a focus of a company objective on loss of habitats could have the indicator ‘habitat cover change’ with data collected on trends in habitat cover loss.
- Response indicators: for response indicators that are informed by the company strategy. For example, to establish the coverage of protected areas.
Explanation of terms
- Biodiversity indicators: biodiversity indicators are communication tools that summarize data on complex environmental issues. They can be used to signal key issues to be addressed through policy or management interventions. Indicators, therefore, are important for monitoring the status and trends of biological diversity and, in turn, feeding back information on ways to continually improve the effectiveness of biodiversity policies and management programmes (GreenFacts, 2006).
Additional information
- For information on using indicators to assess biodiversity performance across company activities, see IUCN’s Guideline for planning and monitoring corporate biodiversity performance.
- For indicator(s) to be useful in a business application, they will need to take into consideration an understanding of the natural system, and an idea of how the system will respond to management (i.e., the indicator will provide a signal that can be attributed to a business).
- Biodiversity indicators help us measure and monitor a) pressures or threats, such as trends in land and water use, habitat loss or invasive species, b) the state of species and ecosystems, such as the health of species or integrity of ecosystems, c) the conservation response, such as the protection of important biodiversity areas, and/or d) benefits to people, such as the ecosystem services that freshwater provides. Fine scale indicators may be developed to inform local decisions on the ground, such as determining the degree to which restoration or management practices are working. Broad scale indicators that aggregate information may be developed to report on the benefits of national environmental policy and conservation investments (IUCN, 2021).
- Note: Companies do not need to develop new indicators. There are several existing indicators used by conservationists. Examples of good biodiversity indicators include those developed for monitoring Aichi targets and the SDGs. Existing indicators can be reviewed and appropriate ones selected.
