Identifying and assessing your biodiversity impacts
If dependencies are about what nature does for your business, impacts are about what your business does to nature. Understanding your biodiversity impacts is no longer optional – it's becoming a regulatory requirement in many jurisdictions and a stakeholder expectation everywhere. More importantly, your impacts on biodiversity create risks that can fundamentally affect your business viability and social license to operate.
ISO 17298 requires organisations to identify and assess their material impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. This assessment forms the foundation for developing meaningful action plans that genuinely reduce harm and, where possible, create positive outcomes for nature.
Understanding biodiversity impacts
The standard defines an impact as "change to biodiversity, whether adverse or beneficial, including possible consequences, wholly or partially resulting from an organisation's activities." This definition is important for several reasons.
First, impacts can be positive or negative. While most impact assessment focuses on harm reduction organisations can also create beneficial impacts through restoration, protection andregeneration activities. Second, impacts can be partial – your organisation might be one of many contributors to a particular biodiversity change. Third, impacts include both direct consequences and cascading effects through ecosystems.
Impacts differ from "pressures," which the standard defines as elements of your activities or products that interact with biodiversity. Think of pressures as the mechanism (waste discharge, habitat clearing, pollution emissions) and impacts as the outcome (water quality degradation, species population decline, ecosystem service loss).
The five main drivers of biodiversity loss
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) identifies five main direct drivers of biodiversity loss, which provide a useful framework for classifying potential impacts:
Land and sea use change includes habitat conversion, fragmentation and degradation. Construction projects, agricultural expansion, urban development, mining operations and infrastructure development all change how land and sea are used, often destroying or fragmenting habitats that species depend on.
Direct exploitation of organisms encompasses harvesting, hunting, fishing and extraction of biological resources. Unsustainable practices can deplete populations beyond their capacity to recover.
Climate change affects biodiversity through temperature changes, altered precipitation patterns, ocean acidification and extreme weather events. While climate change itself is a driver organisational activities contributing to climate change create biodiversity impacts.
Pollution includes chemical contamination, plastic waste, nutrient loading, noise and light pollution. These affect species health, reproduction, behavior and survival. Pollution impacts often extend far beyond the source through air and water movement.
Invasive species can be introduced through global trade, transport and supply chains. Once established, they can devastate native ecosystems by outcompeting native species, disrupting food webs or introducing diseases.
Conducting your impact assessment
Start by mapping all activities within your defined scope. For each activity, identify potential interactions with biodiversity. A manufacturing facility might discharge wastewater (pollution pressure), occupy land (habitat conversion pressure) and emit greenhouse gases (climate change pressure). A logistics company might contribute to habitat fragmentation through infrastructure, introduce invasive species through global transport and create noise pollution affecting wildlife.
Examine your entire value chain. Raw material extraction often has the most severe biodiversity impacts – agriculture driving deforestation, mining operations clearing habitat, fisheries depleting marine populations. Manufacturing processes create pollution impacts. Product use and disposal generate additional pressures.
Don't overlook indirect impacts. Your financial investments might fund activities with biodiversity impacts. Your purchasing decisions influence how suppliers manage land and resources. Your presence in a region might catalyse broader development that fragments habitat.
Assessing impact materiality
ISO 17298 requires organisations to identify which impacts are "material" – significant enough to warrant priority management attention. The standard notes that materiality can be assessed qualitatively, semi-quantitatively or quantitatively and should integrate available scientific data and current knowledge.
Several criteria help determine materiality:
Severity or scale: How intense is the impact? How large an area does it affect? How many individuals or species are affected? An impact affecting a small population of a critically endangered species might be highly material even if geographically limited.
Frequency: How often does this impact occur? Is it continuous, seasonal, occasional or rare? Regular impacts generally warrant higher priority than one-time events, though catastrophic one-time impacts can certainly be material.
Likelihood: How certain are you that this impact will occur? Proven impacts rate higher than theoretical possibilities, though high-probability potential impacts also require attention.
Duration: Is this impact temporary, lasting days or months or permanent? Permanent impacts like habitat destruction generally rate as more material than reversible impacts.
Irreversibility: Can this impact be reversed through restoration or does it cause permanent biodiversity loss? Species extinction and ecosystem collapse are irreversible impacts at human timescales.
Timing: When will this impact occur – immediately, in the near term (within one year), medium term (one to ten years) or long term (beyond ten years)?
Assessing impacts in geographic context
Location is crucial to impact assessment. The same activity has vastly different materiality depending on where it occurs. Habitat clearing in a degraded agricultural landscape has different implications than clearing in an intact primary forest. Water extraction from an abundant watershed differs from extraction in a water-stressed region.
ISO 17298 specifically requires organisations to assess activities that adversely affect ecosystem services providing benefits to third parties. If your water discharge degrades a river that downstream communities depend on for fishing, drinking water or irrigation, that impact has heightened materiality due to its effects on human wellbeing and livelihoods.
Consider proximity to critical habitats – areas supporting endangered species, endemic species, significant migratory populations or unique ecosystems. Impacts near critical habitats require especially careful assessment and management.
Using best available science
The standard requires describing how you integrate available scientific data and state-of-the-art knowledge in impact characterisation. This means consulting scientific literature, engaging biodiversity experts, using established assessment tools and databases and staying current with advancing methodologies.
Tools like the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT) provide geographic data on protected areas, endangered species ranges and critical habitats. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) offers species occurrence data. Impact assessment frameworks like the Science-Based Targets for Nature and TNFD provide structured methodologies.
For complex or high-impact situations, engage qualified ecologists or environmental consultants to conduct detailed impact assessments using standardised methodologies appropriate to your context.
From assessment to action
Impact assessment isn't an end in itself – it's a foundation for action. Your material impacts become the focus of your biodiversity action plan, which Article 8 in this series will explore in detail.
The mitigation hierarchy provides the framework: avoid impacts where possible, minimise unavoidable impacts, restore degraded ecosystems and finally consider offsets for truly residual impacts. Understanding your impacts with clarity and honesty is the essential first step toward meaningful reduction of harm and creation of positive outcomes for biodiversity.
Document your impact assessment methodology, findings and uncertainties transparently. This documentation supports internal decision-making, enables tracking over time and fulfills growing disclosure expectations from regulators, investors and other stakeholders. Most importantly, it demonstrates your organisation's commitment to understanding and managing its relationship with the natural world that business ultimately depends on.
