Bottom‐up global biodiversity metrics needed for businesses to assess and manage their impact
Frank Hawkins, Craig Beatty, Thomas M. Brooks, Rebekah Church, Wendy Elliott, Edit Kiss, Nicholas B. W. Macfarlane, Juliette Pugliesi, Aafke M. Schipper, Maria Walsh
Abstract
Ensuring that companies can assess and manage their impacts on biodiversity will be crucial to solving the current biodiversity crisis, and regulatory and public pressure to disclose these impacts is increasing. Top-down intactness metrics (e.g., Mean Species Abundance) can be valuable for generating high-level or first-tier assessments of impact risk but do not provide sufficient precision or guidance for companies, regulators, or third-party assessors. New metrics based on bottom-up assessments of biodiversity (e.g., the Species Threat Abatement and Restoration metric) can accommodate spatial variation of biodiversity and provide more specific guidance for actions to avoid, reduce, remediate, and compensate for impacts and to identify positive opportunities.