Measuring and Valuing Biodiversity at Site Level supplement

Awareness of the risks posed by global biodiversity decline is increasing among investors and within companies. This is driving positive action to halt or reverse biodiversity loss. Guidance on how to measure biodiversity is needed to support these efforts. At the end of 2022, the Align project published recommendations for a corporate biodiversity measurement and valuation standard, with technical principles and criteria that define which elements of biodiversity should be measured and how to do so in different business contexts.

This publication is part of a series of guidance notes that have been produced to support the implementation of the Align recommendations, outlining different decision-making contexts and concrete examples of measurement approaches suitable for site-level assessment, bringing the recommendations to life. It focuses on the implementation of recommendations at sites with direct operational control.

The examples in this paper are derived from shell companies that are used to describe use cases for measuring biodiversity impacts and dependencies. These cases illustrate the possible measurement methodologies that a company can use, structured around the criteria presented in the Align recommendations.