The complex and underdeveloped world of corporate biodiversity disclosures has slowly begun to take shape, albeit with an emphasis on slowly. A key purpose of our project is to not only understand how companies are approaching biodiversity disclosures, but also to understand how they are not. In other words, we want to develop a clear distinction between what it means to report adequately on biodiversity and what it means to underreport.
This challenge is not one that took up much mental space for me in my past experience thinking about sustainability disclosures. In the past I had focused on, for example, the types of metrics and frameworks that exist and their rates of adoption. However, what received less attention was developing an assessment tool for underreporting. Sustainability disclosures are already a shotgun approach. We see companies referencing all sorts of standards and making use of various internal and external indicators in their sustainability and/or impact reports. With no standardized approach to such disclosures, it becomes difficult to develop a standardized underreporting assessment tool. Chipping away at developing such a tool is what has kept our group at equal parts doubtful, confident, overwhelmed, and inspired.
The uncertain task of developing a standardized tool for an act that is anything but standardized has given our team a great excuse to dive deep into the existing key frameworks related to biodiversity. It has forced our team to gain an intimate understanding of who the key players are in determining important biodiversity indicators and how relevant those players are in the eyes of the corporation. Furthermore, our team wound up doing a sort of mapping of the structure of key frameworks and standards in order to develop an understanding of what it means to underreport. The result of our work thus far has culminated in sharing with our client a first iteration of our underreporting assessment tool. The good news, we are on the right track with developing our own novel set of underreporting criteria (repurposed from the hard work of existing frameworks). The expected news, edits need to be made and it will continue to be an iterative process by which we are constantly incorporating feedback from our client.
All in all I feel grateful to have a client that embraces an iterative approach to working together on the development of a new tool.