NAT.B01.EC Assessment of Impacts on Nature Downstream Value Chain
About the data
This metric was designed by The World Benchmarking Alliance, more information can be found here. Sources and Alignments for each indicator can be found here as well as the scoring guidelines here
The World Benchmarking Alliance's Nature Benchmark measures and ranks the world's most influential companies on their efforts to protect our environment and its biodiversity.
This metric relates to the Indicator: The company assesses its impacts on nature, including biodiversity and nature's contributions to people, both within its own operations and the upstream and downstream parts of its value chain.
Rationale: Impacts on nature can be broadly described as changes in the state of ecosystems and species, resulting from human activity, occurring because of both direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss (IPBES, 2019). The benefits provided by biodiversity are essential to human wellbeing. Yet despite past and current efforts, biodiversity continues to deteriorate and could reach a disastrous tipping point under business-as-usual conditions. This is becoming a major concern for corporate activity, and there is growing demand for companies to disclose reliable data on this topic. However, according to the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB, 2021), this is currently no common practice and only around 10% of companies (CDSB, 2020) report high-level commitments and some relevant metrics. Disclosure will play a key role in achieving global biodiversity targets and in triggering the systemic changes required to do so.
Methodology
WBA analysed all publicly available group-level disclosure in English on the applicable group website, which was predominantly annual reports and sustainability reports. Draft assessments were then sent to each company inviting them to provide feedback. This feedback could include additional publicly available group disclosure published. These were then reviewed and finalised. Final assessments were then shared with each company before being published online.
For this metric the company needs to disclose the same process as above, but to its downstream activities. This includes disclosing the results of such process, along with the methodology followed. The assessment needs to cover all of its downstream operations. In the case it doesn't cover all, this can be met if it covers roughly a third of downstream value chain and the company discloses have a timebound commitment to cover all operations.