The June 2020 adoption of the EU Taxonomy Delegated Acts marked a subtle but decisive shift in how biodiversity considerations are expected to integrate into supply-chain management across sectors. For many agribusinesses in particular, this new regulatory architecture introduces complexities that go beyond carbon footprints or energy efficiency metrics. The biodiversity objective now requires firms to take a hard look at where and how their sourcing practices intersect with ecosystems at risk. And this, predictably, is no easy task—not least because biodiversity, unlike CO₂ emissions or kilowatt hours, resists tidy quantification.
At the heart of the challenge lies the need to map supply chains geographically against areas of ecological sensitivity. Here, Copernicus—the EU’s open-access satellite data platform—emerges as an indispensable tool. It’s not that Copernicus offers a pre-packaged biodiversity risk score for each supplier. Rather, it provides the raw geospatial data necessary for firms to build their own risk profiles, combining supply-chain locations with indicators such as land cover, habitat fragmentation, and signs of ecosystem degradation. But of course, data alone rarely tells the full story. It requires interpretation, integration, and, frankly, a willingness to accept that any model built will involve assumptions and simplifications.
For agribusinesses beginning this mapping process, the first step is deceptively simple: compile a list of all primary sourcing regions down to as granular a level as the data allows. This isn’t always as straightforward as it sounds. Supplier declarations can be incomplete or vague, and intermediaries in the chain may blur the lines of origin. Even when regions are known, pinning down precise coordinates or boundaries can require additional effort—sometimes even direct engagement with suppliers or on-the-ground verification.
Once sourcing regions are identified, the next step involves overlaying these areas onto Copernicus datasets. Tools like the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service or the European Space Agency’s Biodiversity Observation Network offer data layers that can highlight deforestation patterns, shifts in land use, or encroachments into protected areas. There’s a temptation, of course, to seek definitive risk thresholds—to draw a line on a map and declare suppliers inside it as high risk and those outside as safe. Reality, as ever, resists such clarity. Ecosystem pressures rarely respect administrative boundaries, and indirect impacts can spill across regions in ways that are hard to model cleanly.
Some firms have started creating tiered risk maps that highlight sourcing zones according to degrees of biodiversity sensitivity—priority one zones for areas overlapping with critical habitats or high levels of endemic species, priority two zones where significant ecosystem services are present but under less immediate threat, and so on. These categorizations, while helpful, always carry the caveat that they are built on imperfect and evolving data.
The process doesn’t stop at mapping, of course. With risk areas identified, agribusinesses are expected to develop mitigation strategies and, importantly, to disclose their efforts. The EU Taxonomy encourages transparency, not just action. Hence the emergence of quarterly biodiversity-risk disclosures in sustainability reports. These reports—ideally more than marketing gloss—should articulate where sourcing intersects with biodiversity hotspots, what steps have been taken to reduce harm, and where challenges remain. There is no one-size-fits-all template for such disclosures, though many firms have begun to converge around certain elements: a summary of mapped sourcing regions; a description of risk categories applied; key indicators tracked over time; and updates on mitigation actions, whether supplier engagement, sourcing shifts, or direct conservation initiatives.
But here, a note of realism seems warranted. Many firms, particularly those with global and complex supply chains, are still at an early stage of this journey. The technical challenges of integrating satellite data with procurement systems, the gaps in supplier traceability, and the sheer scale of biodiversity metrics to consider—these all conspire to slow progress. Moreover, biodiversity risks are dynamic; what is low risk today may not be tomorrow, as land use changes or climate pressures accelerate.
Still, the direction of travel is clear. The EU’s Taxonomy framework, combined with societal and investor pressures, ensures that biodiversity will no longer sit quietly at the margins of supply-chain reporting. And as more firms engage with tools like Copernicus, there will likely be a maturing of methodologies—a convergence, perhaps, toward common standards for how biodiversity risk is measured, disclosed, and addressed. For now, though, many companies find themselves navigating uncharted terrain, balancing ambition with practical constraints, and trying, often imperfectly, to reconcile the demands of commerce with the realities of ecosystem fragility.