Biodiversity monitoring company NatureMetrics has launched a free tool for businesses to score their nature performance by answering a series of questions.

The NATUREscore tool from the UK-based company aims to evaluate a company’s maturity on nature, outline pathways for enhancement, and support discussion, it said in a press release.

“In today’s business landscape, nature-related risks are finally starting to be taken seriously, impacting organisations of all sizes and sectors. Our tool helps to address this crucial issue, by providing an insight into a company’s nature maturity,” said Pippa Howard, chief nature strategist at NatureMetrics.

“Our ambition is that it will help empower organisations to identify gaps, mitigate risks, and seize opportunities for improvement, ultimately fostering a more sustainable and resilient future for their business and nature,” Howard told Carbon Pulse.

The tool scores companies out of five, based on responses to 17 questions across the six themes of nature strategy, accountability, transformation, understanding, response, and education.

Source: NatureMetrics

For example, a low score in transformation of two out of five, in the transformation theme, suggests that companies should engage with forums such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures.

The six scores are then aggregated into an overall verbal assessment, such as “committing” for organisations moving beyond mere compliance with regulation.

The emailed results are designed to complement existing risk screening tools, such as the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT) and Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure (ENCORE).

MONITORING BIODIVERSITY CREDITS

NatureMetrics helps companies in sectors such as mining to gather biodiversity data, powered by environmental DNA (eDNA), with the aim of helping them to reduce their nature-related risks.

When eDNA is combined with spatial tools and machine learning to draw up a more holistic picture of ecosystem conditions, the results can inform more accurate biodiversity measurements, with biodiversity credit implications, Howard said during an event in London this week.

“What we want to see when we get to biodiversity credits, is how we can maintain the integrity of the whole credits – whether we’re able to monitor it over time with enough rigour that’s going to mean that those tokenised units, that stuff that we want to sell, is actually based on real science.”

In March, global conglomerate Unilever partnered with NatureMetrics to harness eDNA technologies for driving regenerative farming practices across its supply chain.

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

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