Businesses are increasingly expected to disclose their dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities related to nature. A routine element of sustainability reporting is the screening of operational sites to identify those that are ecologically sensitive and therefore should be prioritised for further evaluation and potential disclosure. However, the biodiversity measurement landscape is complex: more than 600 biodiversity metrics exist, which makes selecting and interpreting appropriate indicators challenging for companies.
The authors set out to develop a straightforward screening framework, guided by the Taskforce for Nature-Related Financial Disclosures, that helps businesses choose and combine widely used global biodiversity metrics. The primary objective was to assess how choices about which metrics to use, buffer sizes around sites, scoring approaches and sensitivity thresholds influence which sites are flagged as priorities for further action and disclosure.
To reduce complexity while retaining complementary information, the authors grouped eleven widely used global biodiversity metrics into four conceptually distinct baskets. Each basket represents a different aspect of biodiversity or conservation concern. The grouping was designed to reflect guidance from the Taskforce for Nature-Related Financial Disclosures and to offer companies a manageable set of complementary indicators for screening operational footprints at scale.
The paper describes the use of these baskets to synthesise multiple metrics, enabling screening outputs that capture different biodiversity dimensions while remaining operationally practicable for businesses with many sites.
Rather than applying the framework only to existing corporate data, the authors created hypothetical but realistic company portfolios representing three sectors: mining, onshore wind energy and agriculture. These hypothetical companies were used to explore how methodological choices influence screening outcomes. Specifically, the study varied:
This scenario-based approach allowed the authors to compare results across a controlled set of assumptions and to examine which sites were consistently flagged as high priority and which were sensitive to methodological choices.
Across the tested metric combinations, the basket framework consistently identified a core set of similar high-priority sites. This suggests that grouping complementary metrics into baskets can reliably highlight locations of conservation concern despite variation in specific metric combinations.
However, the study also found that site rankings and the final set of priority sites changed with methodological decisions. Choices such as buffer size, scoring method and the sensitivity threshold materially influenced screening outputs. Thus, while many priority sites were robust to metric selection, the precise ordering of sites and some inclusion/exclusion decisions were dependent on method parameters.
The findings indicate that a basket-based approach using complementary global metrics can help companies consistently identify many ecologically sensitive sites for further assessment. At the same time, the variability introduced by methodological choices underscores the importance of careful, transparent decision-making when screening for ecological sensitivity.
If businesses use different metrics, buffer sizes, scoring systems or thresholds, their reported priorities for nature-related assessment and disclosure may differ. This has direct implications for investors, regulators and stakeholders who rely on corporate disclosures about nature-related risks and impacts.
Based on the observed influence of methodological choices on screening outputs, the authors recommend clearer guidance on metric selection and application for corporate site screening. They also call for greater transparency from companies about the assumptions, methods and limitations used when screening operational sites for ecological sensitivity. Such transparency would help stakeholders interpret screening outputs and compare results across organisations.
The paper suggests that adopting a structured, basket-based framework aligned with Taskforce for Nature-Related Financial Disclosures guidance can improve consistency, but that methodological clarity and disclosure remain essential.
The work was supported by the UBP Nature Finance Initiative and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. The authors declared no competing interests. The manuscript is a preprint posted on bioRxiv and has not been certified by peer review. Supplementary materials accompany the preprint. Specific methodological parameters, full metric lists, and detailed numerical results are reported in the preprint; where not described in the main text, further details are available in the supplementary material linked with the article.