Electronics company Nokia has announced support for a research project from a Finnish university that aims to pave the way towards a common international standard for biodiversity footprints.

Alongside Sitra, a fund accountable to the Finnish government, Nokia has agreed to fund the University of Jyvaskyla’s biodiversity footprint research.

The project aims to establish a “common language” between existing metrics, paving the way towards a standard over five years, without creating the actual standard itself.

The donations programme at Nokia, which contributed an undisclosed amount, “aims to tap into the brightest minds in academia to explore high-impact areas with future relevance to Nokia,” Subho Mukherjee, vice president of sustainability at Nokia, said.

So far, biodiversity footprint standards for different kinds of organisations and industries “do not exist”, although general accounting principles and tools are under development, Nokia said.

Although many different methods of measuring biodiversity footprints have emerged over the last few years, they gauge different elements of nature while offering incomparable metrics.

Guidance from bodies such as Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures and MSCI can help companies get started now in finding the metrics most appropriate for them, but the process is not simple.

Based in central Finland, the University of Jyvaskyla’s biodiversity footprint team has around 10 people. The new funding will enable the team to establish a route for an individual to become a professor in biodiversity footprints.

CONVERTIBILITY BETWEEN METRICS

Lasse Miettinen, director of sustainability solutions at Sitra, said the university researchers aim to explore whether convertibility between currently available metrics is possible. Sitra granted €190,000 to the initiative.

“They have much in common under the hood. If we could establish a common language between the different metrics – i.e. determine whether, or to what extent, the results from one metric could be converted to another – that would be a major breakthrough,” Miettinen told Carbon Pulse.

“From such a common language, it would be just one additional step towards a shared international metric, around which a global standard could be built.”

A “full biodiversity footprint” needs to account for all five drivers of biodiversity loss defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), Miettinen said. The IPBES drivers are: land-use change, climate change, pollution, natural resource exploitation, and invasive species.

The leading metrics today only account for four drivers at most, he said.

“Demonstrating how to get all five together would complement how to get all the biodiversity footprint measurement into a truly comprehensive one.”

SCATTERED FOOTPRINTS

The problem the project is trying to solve is biodiversity footprint assessments and indicators are too “scattered”, Sami El Geneidy, biodiversity footprint team lead told Carbon Pulse.

“Many methodologies and indicators exist that approach the same issue from slightly different viewpoints.”

Footprinting methodologies are developed separately, resulting in divergent metrics and no ‘common language’ between them, Miettinen said.

The European Commission’s biodiversity workstream has recommended 29 different tools for measuring biodiversity. A few leaders include:

• CDC Biodiversite’s Global Biodiversity Score
• Biodiversity Footprint for Financial Institutions (BFFI), developed by CREM and PRe Sustainability for ASN Bank
• Iceberg Data Lab’s Corporate Biodiversity Footprint

Many of the metrics treat all ecosystems as equal, without recognising how losing a hectare in a rainforest would be a greater loss than a hectare in newer growth forest, Miettinen said.

They seldom tackle the ecological significance of a change in conditions, he said.

“For a company desiring to have its biodiversity footprint assessed, the situation is a difficult one, as the results of one metric are not comparable to another.”

“There is an urgent need for a convergence of the most promising metrics, in order to achieve a shared international metric for biodiversity impacts.”

A TOOL TO IMPLEMENT TNFD

El Geneidy said his group will report on its methodologies and results frequently over the five-year funding period.

The team is constantly testing the developed methodologies and indicators of biodiversity footprint assessment with different organisations, he said.

“Our goal is to actively interact with market actors and help them embark on biodiversity footprint assessments … with the methodologies we develop.”

The TNFD published final general disclosures on nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks, and opportunities in September.

El Geneidy commended the TNFD while saying it does not give the tools to conduct assessments in practice.

“I think our approach can be seen as a tool to implement the TNFD framework in organisations,” he said.

In September, the university team calculated the biodiversity footprint of Finnish corporate network S Group using its own methodology.

By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com

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