Overview
What Darwin is and how it assesses biodiversity impacts, dependencies and nature risks.
What is Darwin?
Darwin is a modular platform for nature-related assessment, designed for organisations that need to understand and manage their relationship with nature — from corporates mapping their biodiversity footprint to financial institutions quantifying nature-related financial risks.
Users can engage at two levels:
- Biodiversity footprint — understand how company activities affect and depend on nature, from raw financial or product data through to quantified biodiversity impacts and dependencies.
- Nature risk assessment — translate footprint results into actionable risk metrics: site prioritization, supply chain exposure, financial risk quantification, and stress testing.
Both layers share the same input data and models. Users who only need footprint outputs can stop at the first layer; risk modules are available as an extension.
How do we assess biodiversity impacts?
Darwin transforms company input data into biodiversity outcomes through 3 types of impact factors, each corresponding to an input data type:
| Impact factor | Input | Key databases |
|---|---|---|
| Monetary | Financial data | EXIOBASE |
| Product | Product & commodity data | Ecoinvent, Agribalyse |
| Pressure-impact | Physical pressures | ReCiPe, IW+, GLOBIO |
Each factor produces up to 3 output types: commodity inventory, pressures inventory, and aggregated biodiversity impacts (species.yr, PDF.m².yr, MSA.m².yr).
A data quality score reflects the precision of the input data used.
For the full methodology, see the Impact module.
How do we assess dependencies?
Darwin assesses company dependencies on ecosystem services using the ENCORE database (2024 update), covering 25 ecosystem services across economic activities.
| Input data | Mapping route |
|---|---|
| Monetary data | EXIOBASE → ENCORE activities |
| Product & commodity data | Ecoinvent / Agribalyse → ENCORE activities |
The assessment covers direct operations and the full value chain (2 tiers upstream, 2 tiers downstream), yielding 1,525 dependency materiality ratings per data point. Results are returned as the maximum materiality rating by scope and ecosystem service. An impact filter slider on the radar lets users narrow the view from all input points down to the top 50% / 25% / 10% by environmental impact.
For the full methodology, see the Dependencies module.
How do we assess nature risks?
Darwin's risk modules translate the footprint assessment into risk metrics across three analytical dimensions: impacts, spatial analysis, and dependencies.
This yields four modules, which can be used independently or in combination:
| Module | Risk pathway | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Sourcing | Transition | High-impact commodities in the supply chain |
| Sites & territories | Transition + Physical | Where your sites are and what is around them — proximity and activity flags that screen for the TNFD LEAP priority locations |
| Financial risk | Transition + Physical | Revenue exposed to nature-related risks |
| Resilience | Physical | Money at risk at a site — climate hazards striking the asset, and nature dependencies failing upstream |
Each module has its own page under Analyze, and the module names match the ones in the platform sidebar.
Risk family: climate or nature
Every risk module labels each risk with a risk family — Climate or Nature — and lets you filter on it. The family is one of two independent axes: it says nothing about whether a risk is transition or physical (a carbon price is climate-transition, the EUDR nature-transition, a flood climate-physical, a pollination collapse nature-physical).
The criterion is how the number is produced, not the causal chain (almost no physical risk is causally pure):
- Climate — a physical hazard modelled directly, as a hazard field. Geophysical hazards (seismic hazard, land subsidence) are filed here too, for want of a third family.
- Nature — a loss travelling through an ecosystem service, or a pressure on one.
A driver carries one family across every module: the family of the engine that prices its loss. Water scarcity, for instance, is a water-stress hazard, so it reads Climate on Sites & territories and Sourcing (Water stress) and on Financial risk (Water supply) alike. The one indicator read through two drivers is Soil and sediment retention: the landslide hazard that references it is Climate, but soil erosion is priced as a nature risk, so the indicator reads Nature on Financial risk. No single row ever shows two families.
| Module | How the family is read |
|---|---|
| Sites & territories | From what each driver's map layer measures — a hazard field is Climate, an ecosystem, pressure or service is Nature. A Risk family control in the scope bar restricts the whole screen to one family. |
| Sourcing | From the same driver catalogue as Sites & territories. The family filter restricts the drivers before scoring, so the score and level change with it. |
| Financial risk | From the same driver catalogue as Sites & territories: an ENCORE indicator is Climate when every driver that reads it is a climate hazard (GHG emissions, Water supply, Flood mitigation, Storm mitigation, Local climate regulation), and Nature otherwise. |
| Resilience | From the engine that priced the loss — climate hazards striking the asset, or nature dependencies failing. |
A risk the catalogue states no family for is listed as Unclassified: it is left out of both the Climate and the Nature reading rather than counted under one, so filtering on Climate and then on Nature can add up to less than the total.