Key Concepts

Key concepts

This section describes how Darwin builds its biodiversity impact factors — the factors that transform company input data into biodiversity outcomes.

Input data

Darwin's impact assessment handles 5 types of input data:

• Financial data — turnover, sales or procurement data (currency)
• Product data — transformed materials & goods (weight or volume)
• Commodity data — subset of product data, raw materials that are standardized and tradable (weight or volume)
• Pressures data — physical flows driving biodiversity loss across the 5 IPBES pressures (e.g. m³ water, km²)
• Sites location data — geographic coordinates or addresses of operational sites; used in impact assessment when regionalized impact factors are available

Impact factors

Three types of impact factors transform input data into biodiversity outcomes:

• Monetary impact factors — translate financial data using EXIOBASE
• Product impact factors — translate product data using Ecoinvent and Agribalyse
• Pressure impact factors — translate pressures using ReCiPe, IW+ and GLOBIO.

Some factors are regionalized; when input data includes geographic information, regionalized factors can be applied.

Outputs

Monetary and product impact factors produce all three output types; pressure impact factors produce pressures and aggregated impacts only.

• Commodities inventory — raw materials associated with business activities (e.g. wheat, crude palm oil, copper)
• Pressures inventory — physical flows driving biodiversity loss (e.g. land occupation: 5,000 km2, water consumption: 10,000 m3)
• Aggregated impacts — quantified biodiversity effects expressed in species.yr (ReCiPe), PDF.m2.yr (IW+) or MSA.m2.yr (GLOBIO)

Modeling routes are summarised below.