Integrating Biodiversity Conservation into Oil and Gas ... - EBI

6. MEASURING IMPACTS AND ACTIONS ON BIODIVERSITY
How can a company measure a specific project’s impact on biodiversity and its company-wide performance in
relation to biodiversity?
A formalized system to measure and monitor the effects
of activities on biodiversity can allow companies – as
well as regulators and civil society – to more easily
understand, predict, minimize and prevent impacts;
manage activities; and develop, monitor and refine
management practices and eventually company policies.
Establishing a system for reporting on impacts can also
help the company to provide assurance and transparency
about its performance and progress on conservation
issues.
Impacts to biodiversity can be measured using
biodiversity indicators. Indicators are a way of presenting
and managing complex information in a simple and
clear manner that can form the basis for future action
and can be readily communicated to internal or
external stakeholders as needed. Designed to provide
an indication of something desirable or undesirable
happening in the surrounding environment, indicators
can be used to evaluate many things, from pressures on
biodiversity to changes in the state of biodiversity to how
a company has responded to biodiversity issues. The key
value of indicators depends on how they are used. The
collection and analysis of information on indicators is
not an end in itself, but rather an input to management
feedback loops that adapt behavior based on the results of
monitoring and evaluation.
There is no one single all-purpose measure for
biodiversity. The complex and dynamic nature of
biodiversity and the general lack of knowledge about
many of its aspects make understanding, predicting and
managing impacts on such systems and the collection of
relevant information very challenging. The different ways
that stakeholders perceive the value of biodiversity and
the location-specific nature of many potential impacts
means that a suite of indicators may need to be developed
for each individual project. Furthermore, in some cases,
biodiversity indicators may not be relevant. As with any
other system to integrate biodiversity into operations,
the determination of whether a company needs to
develop and use indicators for a particular project will
depend on a risk assessment process that identifies the
value of biodiversity at a particular site and the need
FIGURE 9: METHODOLOGY FOR DEVELOPING
PROJECT-LEVEL AND COMPANY-LEVEL
BIODIVERSITY INDICATORS
for specific monitoring and measurement of predicted
significant biodiversity impacts.
Because indicators will vary from project to project and
company to company, the focus of this section and its
related EBI guide, Biodiversity Indicators for Monitoring
Impacts and Conservation Actions, is on a methodology for
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Integrating Biodiversity Conservation into Oil and Gas Development