Assessing and enhancing farmland biodiversity within the food industry: towards an evidence-based online tool

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There is strong demand from the food and farming industries to find ways to measure the impact of their farm practices on biodiversity and the critical ecosystem services it delivers, such as pollination and nutrient cycling. Being able to measure these impacts at a farm level not only helps inform the management decisions of individual farmers, but is essential for food and drink companies to enhance ecosystem services and biodiversity through their supply chains. This project will develop a module to measure and manage biodiversity within the Cool Farm Tool, an industry-led environmental decision-support tool used by suppliers of major food retailers including PepsiCo, Marks & Spencer and Heineken. Uniquely, the new module will consult the body of existing scientific evidence to evaluate the impact of farm practices on biodiversity. It will also provide specific guidance to users on how to improve biodiversity performance in their context. The module will combine a method of measuring biodiversity impact in line with industry guidance - the Gaia Biodiversity Yardstick developed by the Centre for Agriculture and Environment, Netherlands (CLM) - with a rigorous approach to evaluating scientific evidence developed at Cambridge University.This project was co-developed by the Cool Farm Institute, the Centre for Agriculture and Environment, Netherlands, University of Aberdeen, University of Cambridge and the BESS Programme Directorate, during a NERC Environmental Data Short Project in September 2013 focused on ecosystem services. In this project, we choose to focus on biodiversity, rather than other ecosystem services, because it is feasible to demonstrate the approach for biodiversity at this stage, as relevant evidence has already been summarised by the University of Cambridge and an industry-approved measurement tool is already developed: the Gaia Biodiversity Yardstick. The Gaia Biodiversity Yardstick specifically includes assessments of species groups that contribute to ecosystem services such as earthworms, insect pollinators and farmland birds. For many final ecosystem services, such as crop pollination or support of wild birds with cultural value, assessing and managing the relevant elements of biodiversity is a critical step towards managing the ecosystem service. The project creates the scope to use a similar approach for tools that measure impacts of farm practice on other ecosystem services, as summaries of relevant evidence become available through ongoing work by the University of Cambridge with the BESS Programme Directorate and the Natural Capital Initiative.The Cool Farm Tool is the only currently-available tool that delivers three crucial aspects of effective decision support. It is 1) scientifically rigorous and credible, 2) friendly and accessible to farmers and 3) has impact in the wider food and drink supply chain. The tool is delivered by the Cool Farm Institute, which is a limited company and not-for-profit entity with corporate partners that include some the largest global food and drink companies: Unilever, Heineken, PepsiCo, and others (www.coolfarmtool.org). The Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform - a pre-competitive consortium of over 50 food companies - endorses the Cool Farm Tool (Sustainable Agriculture Initiative, 2009). By working with this tool, the project is incorporating biodiversity and ecosystem services science into practice in major food and drink supply chains, through a route that delivers significant impact for the underlying ecological science and for the BESS Programme.