Biodiversity accounting for sustainable development  

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1 permeate various governmental and non-governmental policies across both public and private domains 2. With increasing urbanisation globally, Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) bears particular relevance as development may have either a direct or indirect bearing on two other equally important goals, namely, Life Below Water (SDG 14) and Life on Land (SDG 15). Therefore, this necessitates methods by which developmental impacts on biodiversity may be assessed, the efforts of which is an on-going exploration worldwide.

The practice of assessing and reporting on the impact of development on biodiversity is termed ‘biodiversity accounting’ and is increasingly adopted by both governments and private enterprises 3. For governments, such biodiversity accounting is demanded by the electorate, while companies seek to support their social legitimacy.  Biodiversity accounting practices in either SDG or Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) contexts are varied with a myriad of definitions and metric tools used in both commercial and non-commercial endeavours. Regardless of the diversity inherent in such, a systematic literature review of 63 publications indicated that biodiversity accounting revolves around overlapping and differentially related themes such as sustainability (e.g., Corporate Social Responsibility [CSR], corporate action on impact mitigation on biodiversity, etc.), biodiversity reporting (e.g., species extinction, etc.), corporate biodiversity management, environmental protection (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, SDG 14 and SDG 15, etc.), and emancipatory accounting (e.g., biodiversity and extinction accounting, etc.) 3. 

The standardisation of biodiversity accounting measurements pose a significant challenge. Even within a country different metrics may be used to account for biodiversity. In the  United Kingdom alone, governmental organisations use different metrics for biodiversity accounting. For instance, the Department of Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has had at least twenty four biodiversity indices since 2007, none of which are regarded as perfect but serve different needs 4. Comparisons among corporations are also made more difficult in the absence of standardised tools and geographical differences 3.  Furthermore, reporting inconsistency, underreporting and vagueness has been documented in a review of over 180 business entities from eight countries with the highest global biodiversity 5. The reviewed studies followed biodiversity guidelines obtained from a common source, namely, the Global Reporting Initiative 6, which attempts to promote globally applicable and socially acceptable sustainability reporting guidelines 7. Additional scrutiny of the guidelines indicated an absence of a standardised and specific metric or tool to assess biodiversity. Therefore, there arises a need for a biodiversity accounting tool which overcomes the aforementioned inadequacies. 

With the need to quantify in some way the impacts of development on biodiversity, the Singapore Biodiversity Accounting (SGBA) metric is a fitting proxy measure of tropical biodiversity within a sustainable development framework as it is derived from a class of extant metrics adopted in various forms internationally 8. The origin of the SGBA from this metric class is described next.