Announcing the Platform’s Methods Workstream Thematic Focus 2025: corporate biodiversity metrics in marine environments. Participate in the first online workshop in June!

In the past decade, corporate biodiversity measurement has made remarkable progress. The Align Recommendations for a standard on measuring and valuing biodiversity in a business context, alongside the EU Business & Biodiversity Platform’s  annually updated report ‘Assessment of Biodiversity Measurement Approaches for Businesses and Financial Institutions’ published since 2018,  have helped drive these significant advancements. This has supported corporate decision making and external reporting.

However, one area has lagged behind— the measurement of corporate biodiversity impacts and dependencies on marine environments. With increasing demand from blue economy businesses, their customers down the value chain as well as blue economy investors for standardised tools, metrics, and reliable data sources to measure biodiversity performance in marine ecosystems, addressing this gap has become critical.

The thematic report for this year, “Measuring corporate biodiversity performance in the marine environment”, will take stock of existing tools, metrics and data sources and offer recommendations. 

The focus will be on specific blue economy sectors, and the finance sector supporting these industries. Blue economy sectors covered in the report are infrastructure and robotics, including submarine cables, marine living resources such as fisheries and aquaculture, marine non-living resources, which encompass oil and gas extraction and mineral mining, marine renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, and maritime transport.

The report will rely on active engagement of the Platform members and other relevant stakeholders. The active engagement will consist of a limited number of interviews with key representatives of blue economy sectors known for their leadership and innovation in this area (to be identified) and two virtual workshops. Workshops will take place in June and September. The first online workshop is scheduled to take place on June 24th from 14:00 to 15:30 CEST. These workshops will be organised with businesses operating in key blue economy sectors, and their suppliers and customers, including finance sector representatives. The first workshop will aim to capture relevant insights from practitioners on tools, metrics and data sources which are applied or have been piloted, as well as related challenges. The second workshop will focus on expectations and recommendations.

The results will be presented at the European Business and Nature Summit in Helsinki in October.

We are seeking interest from Platform Members and other relevant stakeholders to participate in the engagement phase. Please reach out to Johan Lammerant (johan [dot] lammerantarcadis [dot] com (johan[dot]lammerant[at]arcadis[dot]com)), Methods Workstream Leader, if you want to be invited to the interviews and/or workshops by June 13th at the latest. Please feel free to share with others who might be interested.