Overview of standards in biodiversity footprinting and natural capital accounting.

Friederike Nabrdalik, Sarah Köhler, DIN e.V.

This document gives an overview on existing standards and standardization activities in the field of biodiversity footprinting and natural capital accounting.

This document gives an overview on existing standards and standardization activities in the field of biodiversity footprinting and natural capital accounting by standardization organizations such as CEN, CENELEC, ETSI, ISO, IEC, and ITU.  In the beginning, the deliverable explains the fundamentals of standardization, from the different document types to the levels of standardization, to the development of standards and the various possibilities of participation in the process of standardization.

Subsequently, the deliverable outlines the standardization research about the responsible committees and the existing standards in the field of biodiversity footprinting and natural capital accounting.

The standards research on standards relevant to the CircHive project has been completed and around 260 standards have been identified. The following two standards committees are considered to be particularly relevant to the CircHive project and it is recommended that their activities be investigated further during the course of the project:
ISO/TC 331 Biodiversity ISO/TC 207 Environmental management
Note that this overview does not include standards developed by organisations whose primary function is not standardization. Therefore, for example, the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA)1, an international statistical standard on natural capital accounting that was developed under the auspices of the United Nations Statistical Commission and adopted in 2021, is out of scope and not included in this document.