Organisation
The entity model that structures a Darwin assessment: organisation units, sites, and the fields that describe them.
Organisation units and sites
A Darwin project models a company as a tree of entities of two kinds:
- Organisation units — any organisational entity that makes up the company: business units, subsidiaries, suppliers, product lines, etc. They are the building blocks that structure the assessment and carry data points.
- Sites — geolocated operational points (factory, farm, warehouse, store…) attached to an entity. Sites always represent own operations (Scope 1) and unlock the spatial risk modules.
The tree has a root entity (the company as a whole, to which results are consolidated), organisation units nested beneath it, and sites attached to entities.
Site location 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.
Entity fields
Entities are described through a set of fields. Some are shared by organisation units and sites, others are specific to one entity type.
Shared fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Parent entity | The entity this one is attached to (its parent in the tree). Drives how results roll up to the company level. |
| Labels | Free tags to categorise and organise entities; used for filtering and grouping. |
| Exposure (m€) | Annual exposure (revenue) attributed to this entity or site, in millions of euros. |
| Ownership | Share of the entity owned by its parent. Default 100%. All of the entity's results (impacts, exposure…) are rolled up to the parent in proportion to this share. |
Organisation-unit fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Scope | Generic value-chain position assigned to the unit — own operations, upstream or downstream. See Data points → value chain & scopes. |
| Sector | Economic sector of the entity, chosen from the EXIOBASE classification (200 products/sectors). See the EXIOBASE ↔ NACE correspondence below. |
| Rank (tier) | Value-chain distance from the company: 1 = direct supplier, 2 = supplier of the direct supplier, etc. |
| Denominator value | A quantity used to divide the entity's results so they can be expressed on a per-unit basis. For example, if an entity represents a product and aggregates the impacts of the total volume produced, setting the number of products as the denominator yields the impact per product. |
Site fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Site type | Typology of the site (e.g. high-input agriculture). It carries two defaults — a default buffer and a default activity — that feed the risk analyses (see below). |
| Location | Geographic coordinates or address. Used to localise impacts and dependencies and to overlay spatial datasets. |
| Buffer (km) | Override of the site type's default buffer — the radius around the site within which the spatial analysis assesses proximity to the risk indicators (all risk layers). Leave empty to use the default for the site type (e.g. 10 km). Allowed range 0.1 – 100 km. |
How site type feeds the risk analyses
The site type's two defaults flow into the risk analyses:
- Default activity — the site's activity profile drives the Dependencies assessment and provides the default risk profile used in Financial risk exposure, the Nature stress test (Nature VaR), and also Priority sites identification.
- Default buffer — in addition, the site type sets a default buffer (overridable via the Buffer field): the radius within which Priority sites assesses the site's proximity to the risk indicators across all risk layers.
Sector classification (EXIOBASE)
The Sector assigned to an organisation unit is taken from the EXIOBASE classification — 200 products/sectors (e.g. Cereal grains nec, Electricity by wind, Construction work (45)). This is the same classification used for site default activities, and it drives default dependencies and nature risk profile.
For users who work in NACE, the correspondence is available both ways. Because the two classifications are built differently, the mapping is many-to-many: one EXIOBASE sector can span several NACE classes, and one NACE code can point to several EXIOBASE sectors.
Download the correspondence tables (CSV):
- EXIOBASE → NACE — the 200 EXIOBASE sectors, each with its NACE section and classes.
- NACE → EXIOBASE — the 610 NACE classes, each with the EXIOBASE sector(s) to pick. Start here if you know your NACE code.