A footprint is not a strategy
This was the starting point of a webinar we recently hosted with one of partner consultancies BL Evolution: many companies invest significant time and money in conducting a biodiversity footprint, yet struggle to turn it into operational decisions.
The issue is not the diagnostic itself — far from it! The real challenge lies in the lack of connection between the data produced and its integration into day-to-day decision-making: Capex allocation, supplier choices, site prioritisation, eco-design, etc. Together with BL, we unpacked this translation process, which we summarise below.
What’s the purpose of a nature footprint?
In practice, most companies are not yet required to conduct a biodiversity footprint… so why bother?
Assessing the mark your company leaves on nature.
A nature footprint is first and foremost an assessment of the impact a company has on biodiversity over a given period, usually one year. The goal is not to achieve an ultra-granular picture but a solid overall view that helps identify key orders of magnitude.
In practical terms: measuring your impacts on nature via one or several indicators.
A footprint can be expressed as a single aggregated indicator or a set of disaggregated indicators: biotope coefficient per surface area, hectares artificialised, kilograms of pollutants, water withdrawals, etc.
This approach differs from a carbon footprint, which addresses only one pressure, or a product LCA, as it covers the entire activity of the company, including all purchases and sometimes product use and end of life.
A compass to understand where impacts come from.
A footprint serves as a compass: it shows, over a given period, where the main negative (or positive) impacts originate and how they are distributed along the value chain.
And ultimately, what is it for?
Even without a strict legal obligation, a nature footprint offers major strategic value:
Identifying critical issues (water, raw materials, local ecosystem pressures…). It’s not a number for show.
Building a coherent biodiversity strategy: ensuring that priority issues highlighted by the footprint are actually addressed.
Meeting stakeholder expectations: CSRD and TNFD require companies to disclose their main impacts and how their action plan addresses them.
How do you link the footprint to strategy?
Is the data generated truly useful? How can it guide daily decisions? In short: how do you turn the assessment into concrete actions that actually reduce biodiversity impacts?
Identify priority action levers.
Once pressures are mapped, it becomes easier to target high-risk geographical areas, the products that contribute most to impacts, suppliers considered “risky,” etc.. The goal is to adopt a materiality approach that avoids disconnected micro-actions (“the beehive on the factory roof”) and drives a more holistic, informed decision-making process.
Identify the right actions by modelling their effects.
Modelling, simulating, and testing is where the footprint truly becomes a decision-support tool. You can fairly precisely estimate the consequences of changing a material, a supplier, or a transformation process. The range of use cases is broad. For example, BL worked on a project simulating the benefits of using semi-permeable parking surfaces—comparing biodiversity loss relative to a natural state, and quantifying the impacts avoided compared to a conventional parking design.
Question your business strategy.
A footprint also helps answer a key question: will your most impactful products or services still be at the core of your strategy tomorrow? This often marks the beginning of a gradual shift toward regenerative business models.
Define the right indicators for your trajectory.
Today, available models do not (yet) allow companies to steer biodiversity using a single reliable aggregated indicator. But a footprint helps identify the parameters that really matter, those the company can act on, and those that will react most quickly to changes. This is exactly the goal of SBTN’s first step: choose priority topics and associated indicators to build a trajectory.
Where Darwin comes in
A software platform can support organisations by providing:
Access to disaggregated indicators (beyond an aggregated footprint): pressures, materials, supplier-level impacts, etc.
The ability to structure operational entities and define actionable KPIs.
An AI-assisted library of objectives and actions.
Tools to build and quantify scenarios (with associated baselines and reference scenarios).
And then what? How do you steer your footprint over time?
Is a footprint a one-off exercise? Does it really evolve from year to year?
Turning nature data into continuous steering.
A footprint helps identify the right field-level indicators, those that will actually respond to actions taken. It’s a compass: you don’t look at it at every step, but you check it regularly to ensure you're still moving in the right direction.
What does this look like in practice?
Another example from BL Evolution: in an engineering-driven company, a qualitative diagnostic had little effect. But when the footprint revealed that 80% of impacts came from procurement, including 30% from copper, everything changed. A more quantitative language helped mobilise procurement, innovation and operations teams, enabling them to test concrete scenarios (change of material, integrate X% recycled, discontinue a product in favour of another), and identify what was feasible and when. Today, the company steers with a handful of key indicators: % recycled copper, number of SBTi-aligned suppliers, product lifespan, % recycled materials in ranges.
Choosing the right level of indicators.
Ultimately, integrating “measured” data (e.g., field data) is the holy grail — confirming that actions taken on pressures have the expected effect on the ground. This creates a continuous feedback loop. You can read more on this on this article.
But beware: field indicators should not obscure the real issues. An industrial player may work for months to optimise the 20% of impacts that occur on site, but will never significantly reduce total impact without addressing procurement.
Key takeaways
You don’t steer with a footprint — you use it to identify the right actionable indicators to steer. If an action clearly reduces a pressure, it should be implemented, even if its exact quantified impact isn’t fully modelled yet. The key is to start moving. And treat analysis as a continuous process, not a one-off exercise.
If that resonates with you, do not hesitate to contact us: you can book a demo or a call on this link here. At Darwin, we are striving to help organisations (businesses or investment funds) build data-driven, risk-informed nature strategies.
