Resource description:
Raw material extraction drives half of global greenhouse gas emissions and up to 90% of biodiversity loss, while linear business models continue to waste valuable resources. Because product design determines up to 80% of life-cycle impacts, integrating biodiversity footprinting into ecodesign strategies is essential to reducing nature related risks, improving resource efficiency, and creating long-term business value. This is true whether your company is responding to biodiversity reporting requirements, seeking market opportunities in sustainable products, or aligning with global or EU nature-related goals.
This primer therefore focuses on applying life-cycle assessment ( LCA ) to two core business needs : product improvement and stakeholder communications. For product improvement, an LCA – and biodiversity and ecosystem footprinting in particular – helps identify nature-related hotspots across product life cycles and supply chains, enabling you to evaluate and select the most effective ecodesign strategies to reduce nature related impacts and develop more resilient, future-fit products. For stakeholder communications, it provides the credible, science-based foundation needed to articulate your organisation’s nature performance to investors, customers and other audiences.
This primer helps your company answer practical questions that guide day-to-day business decisions :
- Which materials your company sources and from where
- What the focus of your operations is and what transformations along the supply chain you are responsible for
- Why you should apply a nature lens to the ecodesign of products and how to do it.
Author/Contact:
Lead author/s : Marina Isasa (Tecnalia) ; Rafael Horn (Fraunhofer) ; Sharon Stauffert, Andreas Gess (University of Stuttgart).
With thanks for the contributions : Christian Bauer (SIG Group) ; Bianca Nijhof ; Caroline de Zutter (Engie); Leticia Guimaraes (Vale); Nadine McCormick, Amanda Griniece, Karina Mereuta (WBCSD) ; Marco Bianchi, Raul Ugarte, Jorge Ortigosa (Tecnalia) ; Guy Duke, Judit Planas, Rosimeiry Portela (Capitals Coalition) ; Jonathan Porter (Oppla) ; Harry Greenfiled (CISL).
Design & layout : Matthew Brown (Oppla).