What type of data do we use?

What type of data do we use?

We handle 5 main types of input data:

• Financial data: turnover, sales or procurement data, expressed in a currency.
• Product data: transformed materials & goods, measured in weight or volume metrics.
• Commodity data: subset of product data, raw materials that are standardized and tradable (e.g., wheat, steel), measured in weight or volume metrics.
• Pressures data: factors driving biodiversity loss (e.g., land use, pollution, climate change), measured in physical flows (e.g., m³ water, km²).
• Sites location data: geographic coordinates or addresses of operational sites, used to localise impacts and dependencies and enable spatial risk assessment.

The type of data provided affects the precision of the assessment:

We handle input data across 2 types of entities:

• Organisation units, any organisational entity: business units, suppliers, products, etc.
• Sites: geolocated sites associated with entities

How do we manage heterogeneous data?

One of the main challenges users faces is managing varying data granularity across internal entities. We address this with a proprietary algorithm that:

• handles multiple data input types, ensuring consistency across different levels (entities, scope).
• automatically propagates relevant data across entities where possible, enhancing overall data quality (with some manual adjustments required for conflict resolution).

This approach ensures that biodiversity assessments in Darwin remain accurate, prevent double counting, and align with real-world business structures. It also gives users control over data usage and refinement, improving the precision of biodiversity footprint calculations.