What could be the main contribution of a future IPBES Assessment on business and biodiversity

1 - The assessment should address how science can help companies assess how they contribute to the 5 main drivers from the IPBES Global Assessment : 1 Land use changes, 2 Resources extractions, 3 Climate changes, 4 Pollution and 5 Invasive species.

One primary suggestion: so far metrics presented at the online conference seem to fall short in tackling the contributions of businesses to Invasive Species drivers of biodiversity loss.

It seems also that available metrics presented are not comprehensively assessing Resource extraction and this is very dangerous and tricky.

• Some resources extractions are not correctly integrated (usually marine resources but also many “low volume resources”)
• Some resource extraction are assessed based on available data on some geographical areas but “forgetting” areas where data are not available. This is very dangerous as these metrics are taken by users (companies/ finance institutions, policy makers) without looking at their caveats and uncertainty level. The imprecision and uncertainty level of some metrics can have some strong perverse effects if not correctly taken into account.

IPBES review could help a lot in uncovering what are the key resources extractions that are not currently assessed and what it means for biodiversity loss and caveats of metrics.

2 – One key aspect concerning helping businesses to assess their biodiversity footprint is to understand that the majority of the metrics initiatives developed so far came to same conclusion that to facilitate use and lower the cost of such assessments, they need to use Biodiversity models.

Please note that by using models, they answer also the issue of providing accessible solution for Small and Medium size enterprises and perhaps small holders (these last ones are key and an area of research). Models helps to overcome the cost and heavy work to collect ad hoc biodiversity data for each company assessment. The fact is that most of the initiatives presented by Bianca at the conference are using Models to develop Metrics and indicators, to avoid asking direct and ad hoc data collection for each companies !

The IPBES report can greatly help if it look at

• the quality and the comprehensiveness of Global Biodiversity models (like Globio, Predicts, etc) which are used to assess dependencies and impacts of businesses process.
• reviewing methodologies helping to integrate smalI holders as supply chain providers of natural resources, to have them finally integrated in the metrics (At the end the issue is that Smallholders with sustainable practices are recognized thanks to the metrics and should benefit from preferences !)