Methodologies for assessing the impact of socioeconomic activities on biodiversity : State of play on biodiversity monitoring, impact assessments, accounting and monetary valuation of biodiversity

Summary

This report provides an overview of the approaches and methods of measuring the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Measuring these impact still has numerous challenges. First, biodiversity is hard to capture with one single indicator, because it has many dimensions. Second, monitoring biodiversity is often expensive and remains a challenge. Third, the causal relationships between human activities and biodiversity are often unknown. Thus, the result of current impact models for biodiversity are based on many assumptions. Fourth, there is no consensus on how biodiversity should be included in the decision-making of companies and nations. There are experiments with biodiversity accounting at company and nation level but the methods need to be developed further. This report concludes with a number of recommendations for future research and policy.