Here you will find information about two practical instruments elaborated within the EU LIFE Initiative “Biodiversity in Standards and Labels for the Food Sector” – short Food & Biodiversity.
We recommend you to use both tools! It is a perfect combination providing synergies and contributing significantly to biodiversity protection.
The Biodiversity Performance Tool (BPT)
facilitates the assessment of the potential for functional biodiversity at farm level.
The BPT supports farmers and farm assessors to identify the current situation regarding biodiversity on the farm, to operationalize biodiversity criteria and to select effective measures for a Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP).
The BPT helps to assess the quality of implementation of measures as well as monitoring of the whole Biodiversity Action Plan.
Certifiers as well as product and quality managers of food companies will get a simple but meaningful overview regarding the quality of the BAP and the biodiversity performance of the farm.
The Biodiversity Monitoring System
allows standards and food companies to monitor the biodiversity performance of certified farms and/or supplying farmers.
The monitoring is based on 25 indicators with high relevance for the protection and creation of potential for biodiversity and the reduction of negative impacts.
Standards and food companies have protected access to include data of their associated farms, to aggregate data sets and to elaborate multiple options of analysis by combining the 25 indicators.
The main objective is to improve the biodiversity performance of standards and sourcing requirements in the food industry by helping standard organisations to integrate efficient biodiversity criteria into their schemes and motivating food processing companies and retailers to include comprehensive biodiversity criteria into their sourcing guidelines.
Besides advising food standards and companies, training modules and material have been elaborated for farm assessors, certifiers and managers of food companies and the Biodiversity Performance Tool was developed.
A Biodiversity Monitoring system and database facilitates monitoring of the biodiversity performance of certified farms. National sector initiatives and a European network will further develop the activities after the end of the project.
The Initiative was launched by a European consortium of Global Nature Fund, Lake Constance Foundation, Agentur AUF! (Germany), Fundación Global Nature (Spain), Solagro and agoodforgood (France) and Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal).