The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosure (TNFD) should make greater use of the Mean Species Abundance (MSA) metric in its framework as it is already used by many companies and would offer a number of benefits, according to a position paper issued by a group of European companies this week.
TNFD released its latest draft framework in March ahead of the publication of a final version in September, and has gone through a period of public consultation.
The framework provides stepwise guidance for companies looking to identify, assess, respond to, and disclose their impacts and dependencies on nature.
In the final version, the taskforce should make broader use of the MSA metric and the related MSA.km2, according to a position paper submitted in May and published this week by CDC Biodiversite, Carbon4 Finance, I Care, Iceberg Data Lab, and Impact Institute.
Seventeen companies endorsed the paper, including La Banque Postale, Ofi invest AM, and Schneider Electric.
“The MSA … is a key metric behind several biodiversity footprint measurement tools: it allows to characterise the intactness of ecosystems with a range from 0% to 100%, where 100% represents an undisturbed pristine ecosystem. It is then spatialised over an impacted surface to obtain results in MSA.km2, that is easy to understand and communicate,” CDC Biodiversity said in a LinkedIn post.
“Publishing these metrics provides the market with an overall and aggregated view of the impacts, enables sectors to be compared with each other, and provides for reliable, comparable, and objective information.”
The paper recommended that TNFD allow MSA and MSA.km2 as global core disclosure metrics associated with ecosystem condition, ecosystem extent, and condition-weighted area.
Additionally, TNFD should use UNEP’s GLOBIO MSA layer – which calculates the impact of environmental drivers on biodiversity in MSA – as a relevant dataset for ecosystem integrity in the locate phase, and MSA/MSA.km2 as assessment metrics for the evaluate phase, the paper argued.
Currently identified core metrics in the TNFD framework are all impact drivers, which the position paper said prevents direct assessment of business contributions to the Global Biodiversity Framework goal of maintaining, enhancing, and restoring ecosystem integrity.
“It is thus necessary to add global core disclosure metrics focused on ecosystem condition, extent, and condition-weighted area,” the paper said, arguing that MSA and MSA.km2 would serve that purpose.
“These metrics also allow to aggregate the pressures covered by the TNFD’s core disclosure metrics. They are thus complementary to impact driver metrics and allow for a global overview of the biodiversity footprint of a company or a financial institution,” the paper said.
The MSA.km2 measure was originally developed by CDC Biodiversite in 2017, while Iceberg Data Lab, one of the co-authors, earlier this year launched a proprietary product using MSA.km2 to determine company impacts on biodiversity.
Meanwhile, the paper said that CDC Biodiversite is in the process of building a consortium to work on an updated version of the GLOBIO MSA layer, based on data from the European Space Agency.
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