BFBI Business Programme Lead Dr Catherine Farrell CIEEM, Trinity College Dublin, writes on the process steps around undertaking a Double Materiality Assessment (DMA) to help guide your nature strategy: this article focuses on the ways to understand how businesses interface with nature, highlighting the data needs but also the language of a DMA.

Following from our inspiring and interactive workshop on March 10th (read about it here), alongside colleagues from Deloitte, the Business for Biodiversity Ireland team led the second of our Action Track workshop series on May 20th. While our initial workshop focused on the key elements of what a Double Materiality Assessment (DMA) is (and/or isn’t), especially the value chain, this time we focused on how we can map and track the interface of business with nature.

This involves homing in on ‘the where’ part of the DMA process. In essence, this means gathering your organisation’s location data like maps, and – in tandem – figuring out the other types of data available, what they measure and why. Then its time to focus on how we might use data (which may be freely available as well as company-held) to inform our DMA. Our colleagues from Deloitte shared their DMA journey, highlighting how tools like the TNFD LEAP (Locate, Evaluate, Assess and Prepare), can help bring understanding of our business interfaces with nature to light.

In this article we focus more on data and the language of data and DMA (beware of the acronyms!):

Data: we hear a lot about data these days, but when we’re trying to understand our business impacts and dependencies (how we rely on nature) we really need to focus on data relating to aspects of nature referenced in the nature-related reporting frameworks like CSRD, TNFD, SBTN and GRI.

We can start by breaking these into –

• Locational data (a map of where we operate – note, start with one part of your value chain and get the hang of it!)
• What types of habitats or ecosystems are present in those places (the basic type and their extent)
• What our impact is on these specific areas of ecosystem (how we influence their condition), and
• How we rely on them (what we need from these ecosystems as inputs, aka ecosystem services to our operations) or impact them.

This helps us Locate, Evaluate and Assess our impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities, and then Prepare to report (think LEAP). We can do this by using available data on habitats, but -now, a health warning – in Ireland habitat data is quite limited. With some ecological input to help, however, we can gather up what is available, in a useful way.

Language: ecological and nature lingo is nuanced but not beyond our reach. It’s helpful to have someone working with us that can communicate these nuances in a clear, simple way. During our workshop we discovered that acronyms and strange ‘eco’ languages can be off putting initially, but once we get into the flow, we find what we need to know.

Many thanks to Aoife Connaughton and Deloitte for collaborating on this workshop, National Biodiversity Data Centre’s Sarah Kelly, and all our Action Track businesses for participating in our Nature Strategy Accelerator Programme, including CIE and CIE Tours, Cloud Assist, Irish Rail, Irish Trees, Future Energy Ireland, KMK, Scott Cawley Ltd, Shannon Airport, Trinity College Dublin and Watermark Coffee.