ENCORE provides visuality to impacts and dependencies

In the BIOPATH Dialogue series, Sebastian Bekker, Senior Program Officer UNEP-WCMC, gave a presentation of the web-based tool ENCORE, developed by the Natural Capital Finance Alliance and UNEP-WCMC.

ENCORE is short for Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure. The tool aims to help users to better understand and visualise the impact of environmental change on the economy. By focusing on the goods and services that nature provides to enable economic production, it guides users in understanding how businesses across all sectors of the economy potentially depend and impact on nature, and how these potential dependencies and impacts might represent a business risk.

Visuality of dependencies and impacts

Sebastian Bekker presented the current features of ENCORE and what is in the plans for further development. The overall functions are used to understand how different economic activities have an effect on nature and how to analyse nature-related risks. How important is the loss of functionality if the ecosystem services are depleted? How significant is the financial loss?

“Materiality is very important, both the frequency of an activity and how quickly they have an effect on nature. ENCORE provides a visuality to your dependencies and impact flows”, explains Sebastian Bekker.

In the first level of ENCORE you can work with non-spatial views. On the spatial level you can get a more detailed understanding of your impact. The spatial data shows global hotspots of natural capital depletion. Organisations that gather location specific data can ensure less negative impact. There is also functionality to explore potential portfolio alignment with the global biodiversity goals.

Data from ENCORE is used as a basis for high-profile reports such as the World Economic Forum, World Bank and the concept is picked up by the framework TNFD, Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosure.

The next steps

In 2021 a biodiversity model was released. To start with it has a focus on agriculture and mining but more sectors will be added over time. In 2023, a new five-year strategy will be launched with the vision to have a global financial system that works for both nature and people. The key words for the future are Enable, Scale and Sustain. There will be more detailed outputs, case studies and guidance on how to move from informed to act on the information.

Link to explore ENCORE (naturalcapital.finance)

Video on ENCORE Biodiversity module: https://youtu.be/bOWFMxvz_N8