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 Assessment section.
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, complemented by a decimal scoring indicator reflecting contributing data point coverage.
For the full methodology, see the Dependency Assessment section.
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 risks | Transition | High-impact commodities in the supply chain |
| Priority sites | Transition + Physical | Sites with significant biodiversity exposure |
| Financial risk exposure | Transition + Physical | Revenue exposed to nature-related risks |
| Nature VaR | Physical | Potential financial losses under nature shock scenarios |
For the full methodology, see the Nature Risks Assessment section.
Last updated 3 weeks ago
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