PBL webinar on Intactness-based Biodiversity Impact Factors

Outreach material and webinar recording on IBIF biodiversity impact factors  

In October 2025, PBL (the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency) published a new dataset on biodiversity impact factors: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-05946-1. The so-called IBIF (intactness-based biodiversity impact factors) dataset contains a coherent set of country-level impact factors, that can be used in methods and tools for biodiversity footprinting and life cycle analysis.

According to Target 15 of the Global Biodiversity Framework of the CBD, large businesses and financial institutions need to assess, disclose and reduce their negative impacts on biodiversity worldwide. Such assessments are often done using methods based on life-cycle-analysis, in which the impact of environmental pressures on biodiversity is calculated using pressure-impact factors.

The new IBIF impact factors can be used to attribute losses in local terrestrial biodiversity intactness to the production or consumption of different goods and services. We used the GLOBIO v4 biodiversity model to obtain the impact factors, based on the mean species abundance (MSA) metric, for 234 countries and five environmental pressures: CO2 emissions, NH3 emissions, NOx emissions, roads and land use (urban land, cropland, pasture, forest plantations and mines).

On Tuesday 25 November 2025,  a webinar was held to share and explain the new set of country-specific ‘biodiversity impact factors’. The target group of the webinar were those interested in biodiversity impact assessment, with a basic knowledge of biodiversity footprinting, using pressure-impact models and assessment tools like input-output models or life-cycle analysis.

In this webinar, we explained how the factors were derived, how they can be applied, the pros and cons of the MSA indicator, and the conditions of use for developers, data providers and others. The slide deck and recording of the session can be found at the bottom of this webpage.

A practical guidance document covering these topics will be made available on this website soon.

Webinar contents:

• Welcome and introduction
• Use of PBL data in a business context – Mark van Oorschot (PBL)
• Introduction to IBIF: Intactness-based Biodiversity Impact Factors – Aafke Schipper (Radboud University)
• IBIF in the wider biodiversity footprinting context – Marina Dumont (PRé Sustainability)
• The pros and cons of biodiversity footprinting: values and limitations – Wijnand Broer  (PBAF)
• Q&A session

Slide deck – PBL Outreach webinar IBIF

Recording of the webinar: