Earth observation data for biodiversity assessment

BioDivER (BioDiversity Environmental Reporting) is a research project by mundialis and Climate & Company that uses satellite and geospatial data to monitor ecosystems around company sites and how they change over time. By linking earth observation (EO) data with georeferenced company locations, BioDivER turns abstract biodiversity questions into transparent, location-specific indicators for sustainability reporting and risk assessment. Our prototype automatically delivers for any number of company sites a PDF report, an interactive dashboard and data tables showing how land cover, habitats, biomass, forests and groundwater around each site have developed over time. The project ran from July 2024 to June 2026 and was funded by the German Space Agency at DLR as part of its call for innovative Earth observation applications supporting the European Green Deal and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Every company depends on nature and affects it, whether through water supply, soils, forests or climate regulation. Reporting frameworks such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) with its biodiversity standard ESRS E4 and the TNFD recommendations therefore call for a site-specific view of impacts and dependencies. In practice, however, most assessments tool, e.g. ENCORE, remain at sector level. EO data can close this gap: they are independent, available worldwide and provide consistent time series. And while mandatory reporting has recently been scaled back by the EU Omnibus package, companies, financial institutions and public authorities increasingly need resilience and risk analyses along their supply chains.

From the start, early access users helped shape the prototype. After a joint kick-off meeting in December 2024, we held bilateral sessions with large companies from the food sector, a credit rating agency and an education and research institution. One food company applied BioDivER to its own site data as part of a CSRD project, and the approach was also tested on supply chains for critical raw materials. Their feedback flowed directly into development: because user needs varied widely, we focused on a common core that can be adapted to specific use cases, and structured the reports by individual site so that supplier locations can be analysed as well.
We also presented BioDivER to more than 30 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in four workshop series, including the pilot process of the German Sustainability Code (DNK) with industry associations and a series on the voluntary SME reporting standard. The workshops showed clear interest in freely available EO data, not least because the voluntary standard asks for site geodata and land use change. At the same time, many SMEs are still working on basic metrics such as CO₂ emissions and have limited capacity to analyse geodata themselves, which underlines the value of ready-to-use, automated reports.

BioDivER shows that site-specific instead of sector-wide assessments of nature-related risks are technically feasible and useful in practice. Companies can back up sustainability claims with data and thus, guard against greenwashing, or detect emerging risks such as droughts at supplier sites early. Rating agencies see potential for ESG ratings in high-impact sectors. The greatest value lies in combining EO data with supply chain mapping, especially in the food sector.

Interest extends well beyond ESG reporting. Climate & Company is integrating the geodata into its Mining Monitor, a tool for tracing critical raw materials, which met strong interest from mining companies, financial institutions and policymakers at a joint workshop with the Global Reporting Initiative in London.