Assessing biodiversity impacts with BioScope
Are you interested in assessing the impacts your activities have on biodiversity? Take a look at BioScope – a free web-based biodiversity assessment tool. With BioScope, you can treat the biodiversity impacts of your business with the care they deserve, and put them front and center in your business decision-making. BioScope was developed for the assessment of supply chains and financial products, and gives you clear, actionable information.
Biodiversity is crucial, and we need to step up to protect it
The backbone of healthy ecosystems is biodiversity, the variety of all living things on the planet. Unfortunately, human activity has a strong negative effect on biodiversity, and it has been declining at an alarming rate. Since 1970, populations of mammals, bird, fish, reptiles and amphibians have dropped on average by 68%. Latin America and the Caribbean, with their sensitive tropical regions, have seen an especially rapid decline in biodiversity (around 94%).
Much of this loss is caused by habitat destruction due to farming and logging. Climate change poses an additional major threat, causing a self-reinforcing vicious cycle for biodiversity. To help halt the loss of biodiversity, it’s crucial to make decisions with biodiversity in mind.
Join the growing number of organizations taking biodiversity into account
More and more companies and financial institutions are putting biodiversity impact measurement on the agenda. Understanding the biodiversity impact of your company and its supply chain, or your investments, is the first step in managing biodiversity impact and risks.
PRé assists companies in calculating the biodiversity footprint of products, companies, and investments with BioScope, a free web-based biodiversity screening tool. BioScope provides businesses and financial institutions with a quick and simple indication of the main impacts their supply chains and financial products have on biodiversity. The simple user interface and the visualization of impacts on a world map make it an easy tool to use, despite it being a science-based assessment that is based on the life cycle assessment methodology.
BioScope has been developed by PRé Sustainability, Arcadis and CODE, commissioned by Platform BEE (Biodiversity, Ecosystems and Economy); a collaboration between IUCN NL and VNO-NCW financed by the Dutch ministry of economic affairs. The environmental impact calculations in BioScope are powered by the SimaPro software.
In 2022, BioScope was updated to draw from Exiobase v3.4, a monetary input-output database. Now, you can choose inputs from 163 sectors in 44 countries and 5 rest-of-world regions, covering all global economic activities. BioScope uses the ReCiPe 2016 Midpoint method to translate this activity data into impacts on biodiversity.
Would you like to get more information on BioScope? Or to learn more about how PRé can support you in assessing the biodiversity impacts of your activities or financial products? Feel free to get in touch.
Tool to determine supply chain biodiversity impact
Marina Dumont
Consultant
We live in highly interconnected systems. By using science and tools, we can learn to understand the dynamics between those systems – and what we can improve and where to do better. I strongly believe that we need interdisciplinarity to solve today’s challenges: improve how we deal with our environment, and by that improve our economy and our society. We need to take responsibility into our hands and change the status quo.