How to identify and manage your organisation’s biodiversity dependencies
Most businesses don't realise how deeply they depend on nature until something goes wrong. A beverage company discovers its water sources are depleting. An agricultural business watches pollinator populations decline, threatening crop yields. A pharmaceutical company finds that habitat loss is eliminating species with potential medicinal compounds. These are all examples of dependency risks – and they're becoming more common as biodiversity loss accelerates globally.
ISO 17298 requires organisations to identify their "material ecosystem services dependencies"– the ways your business relies on nature to operate. This isn't an academic exercise. Understanding your dependencies is fundamental to business continuity, risk management andlong-term resilience.
What are ecosystem services?
Before identifying dependencies, you need to understand what ecosystem services are. The standard defines them as "benefits people obtain from one or several ecosystems." These services are typically grouped into four categories:
Provisioning services provide tangible goods: water for manufacturing, timber for construction, fiber for textiles, food from agriculture and fisheries, genetic resources for pharmaceuticals and biochemicals for various industries.
Regulating services control environmental conditions: climate regulation through carbon storage, water purification by wetlands, pollination of crops, pest control by predators, disease regulation and flood protection by coastal ecosystems.
Cultural services offer non-material benefits: recreational opportunities, aesthetic beauty, spiritual significance, educational value and cultural heritage.
Supporting services make all other services possible: soil formation, nutrient cycling, water cycling and photosynthesis. These are sometimes called ecosystem functions.
The dependency identification process
Start by mapping your operations, products and supply chain. For each significant activity, ask: "What do we take from nature?" and "What natural processes enable this activity?"
A textile manufacturer might depend on water for dyeing processes (provisioning service), wetlands that filter that water before discharge (regulating service) and cotton that requires pollination (regulating service). A tourism operator might depend on beautiful landscapes (cultural service), clean beaches maintained by dune ecosystems (regulating service) andseafood harvested sustainably (provisioning service).
Don't limit your analysis to direct operations. Examine your entire value chain. If you're a food retailer, your most material dependencies might be in your agricultural supply chain, not in your stores. Raw material acquisition, manufacturing processes, transportation systems and product use all involve dependencies on nature.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment provides a comprehensive classification system that can guide your identification process. Tools like the Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure (ENCORE) database can help you understand which ecosystem services are relevant to your specific sector.
Assessing dependency levels
ISO 17298 requires organisations to assess the level of each identified dependency. This assessment can be qualitative, semi-quantitative or quantitative, depending on your resources and needs.
A qualitative assessment might rate dependencies as high, medium or low based on expert judgment. How critical is this ecosystem service to your operations? Could you continue operating without it? What alternatives exist?
A semi-quantitative assessment might use a scoring system, perhaps rating dependencies on a scale from one to ten based on multiple criteria: criticality to operations, availability of substitutes, reversibility of loss and geographic concentration of dependency.
A quantitative assessment measures dependencies in concrete terms: cubic meters of water consumed, tons of biomass harvested, number of products requiring pollination or financial value at risk if the service degrades.
For most organisations, a mixed approach works best. Use quantitative data where readily available – water consumption meters, purchasing records for natural materials – and qualitative assessment where data is limited but expert knowledge exists.
Identifying material dependencies
Not all dependencies are equally important. Material dependencies are those that significantly affect your business operations, financial performance or strategic objectives. These are your priorities for action.
Consider several factors when determining materiality. Volume or value: How much of this ecosystem service do you use and what's its economic value? Substitutability: If this service became unavailable, could you substitute it? At what cost? Geographic concentration: Does your dependency rely on ecosystem services from a small number of locations, creating concentration risk? Baseline condition: Are the ecosystems providing this service already degraded or under stress? Trend: Is the availability of this service improving, stable ordeclining?
A water-intensive manufacturer in a water-stressed region has a highly material dependency. A business that relies on a single pollinator species for a major product line has high material dependency. A company sourcing timber from increasingly depleted forests faces material dependency risk.
Location matters
Dependencies are always location-specific. Water might be abundant and cheap in one region but scarce and expensive in another. Pollination services might be thriving in diverse agricultural landscapes but declining in monoculture zones. Document not just what you depend on, but where those dependencies exist geographically.
If you can't identify precise locations – common with complex supply chains – use the best available data and reasonable assumptions. Note these data gaps for future refinement. The standard recognises that dependency assessment is an iterative process that improves over time.
Connecting dependencies to business risk
Dependencies become risks when the ecosystem services you rely on degrade or disappear. A brewery dependent on clean groundwater faces operational risk if aquifer contamination occurs. A ski resort dependent on reliable snowfall faces financial risk as climate change affects precipitation patterns. A cosmetics company sourcing plant extracts faces supply chain risk if habitat loss eliminates source species.
Article 4 in this series will explore biodiversity-related risks in detail, but remember that dependency analysis is the foundation. You cannot understand your risks without first understanding what you depend on.
Practical implementation steps
Begin with your most significant operations or products. Conduct facilitated workshops with operational staff who understand processes intimately. They often recognise dependencies that executives miss. Use sector-specific guides where available – industries like agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and beverage, textiles, pharmaceuticals and tourism have established dependency profiles.
Engage with suppliers to understand upstream dependencies. Many companies discover their most material dependencies exist in their supply chain rather than in direct operations.
Document your findings clearly, including the methodology used, data sources, assumptions made and limitations identified. This documentation supports both internal decision-making and external disclosure requirements.
Building resilience
Understanding dependencies isn't the end goal – it's the beginning. With clear knowledge of what your business relies on from nature, you can design strategies to protect those dependencies, reduce reliance where possible and build resilience into your operations. This understanding will directly inform your biodiversity action plan, helping you prioritise investments that protect the natural systems your business depends on for long-term success.
