What type of data do we use?
The five types of input data Darwin handles for biodiversity assessment, and the two types of entities.
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.
Sites data unlocks Darwin's risk assessment modules: priority site identification, financial risk exposure, and Nature VaR. Without site locations, risk analysis is limited to sector-level estimates.
The type of data provided affects the precision of the assessment:
| Data type | Quality | Precision |
|---|---|---|
| Pressures | A | Highest — measurable physical flows |
| Commodity | B | High — specific raw materials |
| Product | C | Medium — product-level averages |
| Financial | D | Lower — sector averages |
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
Each organisation unit can be positioned in the value chain by assigning it a generic scope — own operations, upstream or downstream. The company (root) and sites always represent own operations (Scope 1). This position drives how each entity's results are consolidated into the company-level scopes.
What value chain do we cover?
Our value chain coverage follows the standard scope framework used in climate and corporate sustainability reporting:
- Scope 1 — Direct operations: pressures and activities from assets directly owned or controlled by the organisation.
- Scope 2 — Indirect energy: purchased energy and utilities consumed by the organisation.
- Scope 3 — Full value chain:
- Upstream: suppliers, raw material sourcing, purchased goods and services.
- Downstream: product use, distribution, customers, end-of-life.
For nature-related assessments, isolating Scope 2 as a standalone scope is less methodologically relevant than in climate accounting: the nature impacts of purchased energy are best captured through the upstream supply chain of energy suppliers. In Darwin, Scope 2 is therefore included within Scope 3 upstream, ensuring complete value chain coverage without double-counting.
We accept input data across all scopes, enabling nature-related risk and impact assessments from a company's direct operations to its full upstream supply chain and downstream distribution network.
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.