BioPrint: Biodiversity Footprint for Businesses

Global value chains as currently organised are responsible for irreversible biodiversity loss, undermining ecosystem services, jeopardizing resource security, and exacerbating health, economic and regulatory risks. The purpose of the BioPrint project is to understand what strategies and practical solutions in the context of biodiversity management can act as a basis for safeguarding biodiversity. This understanding guides companies to implement high-impact biodiversity management actions across value chains.

The project team is an inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration of the Life Cycle Assessment Research Group of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (biodiversity quantification expertise), Bern University of Applied Sciences (Social Marketing, behaviour change expertise), University of Zurich (business, sustainable marketing expertise), and öbu (sustainability management and value chains expertise). 

BioPrint includes quantitative biodiversity dimensions in life-cycle-based impact assessment along value chains on sector, company, and product levels to enable decision-makers to identify those strategies and practical solutions with relevant and effective impacts in reducing biodiversity footprints. Hence, BioPrint establishes a life-cycle-based foundation for company-level biodiversity management, initially focusing on a selection of products within a high-priority sector followed by rolling out the learnings across further sectors. 

BioPrint develops strategic frameworks and practical and standardised implementation solutions and includes organizational, cultural, and social factors that currently pose major challenges to companies implementing biodiversitypositive strategies and actions. To this end, it considers real business environments and the constraints of implementing value chain transformation without significantly compromising value creation.