Tools & Mechanisms

Environmental due diligence (EDD) for renewable technologies

http://www.unep.fr/energy/activities/ddg/

Guidelines on EDD for Renewable Energy Technologies, developed by UNEP and its Collaborating Center BASE, provide a practical tool for financiers and investors to check and mitigate their risk of investments in this sector. The EDD guidelines are intended to provide practical, standardized procedures for identifying and managing environmental impacts associated with investments; in particular, renewable energy technologies.

Global Biodiversity Information Facility

http://data.gbif.org

GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, was established in 2001 to take on a special set of tasks that will make it possible for policy- and decision-makers, research scientists and the general public all around the world to electronically access the world's supply of primary scientific data on biodiversity.

Global Bioenergy Partnership

http://www.globalbioenergy.org/

The purpose of the Global Bioenergy Partnership is to provide a mechanism for Partners to organize, coordinate, and implement targeted international research, development, demonstration, and commercial activities related to production, delivery, conversion, and use of biomass for energy, with a focus on developing countries.

GBEP provides also a forum to develop effective policy frameworks to:

• suggest rules and tools to promote sustainable biomass and bioenergy development;
• facilitate investments in bioenergy;
• promote project development and implementation;
• foster R&D and commercial bioenergy activities.

Global Water Tool

http://www.wbcsd.org/work-program/sector-projects/...

A World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) tool to help companies and organizations to map their water use and assess risks relative to their global operations and supply chains.

High Conservation Value Forest Toolkits

http://www.hcvnetwork.org/resources/global-hcv-too...

A series of toolkits to enable the identification of areas of high conservation value forest – many commodity standards require this.

Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP)

http://www.isep.or.jp/e/Eng_index.html

The ISEP is an independent, non-profit research organization, founded in 2000 by energy experts and climate change campaigners. The endeavour to provide resources and services to support sustainable energy policies. Some central activities carried out by ISEP include advising the japanese government and local municipalities on topics relating to the promotion of renewable energy, the improvement of energy efficiency, and restructuring the energy market.

Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT) for Business

http://www.ibatforbusiness.org/

IBAT for business is an innovative tool designed to facilitate access to accurate and up-to-date biodiversity information to support critical business decisions. The tool is the result of a conservation partnership among BirdLife International, Conservation International, International Union for Conservation of Nature and UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre

IBAT provides decision-makers with access to critical information that supports planning and implementation of environmental safeguard policies and industry best practice standards. IBAT includes globally compiled spatial and tabular data drawn from established networks of national and regional sources on protected areas (World Database on Protected Areas), sites of global conservation importance (Key Biodiversity Areas, including Important Bird Areas and Alliance for Zero Extinction sites) and globally threatened species (The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species). These represent the majority of globally compiled biodiversity databases available at the scale of individual sites and species ranges. The International Finance Corporation, the Inter American Development Bank and J P Morgan are examples of organisations currently using the tool.

Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs

http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/InVEST.html

A mapping tool to enable companies, policy-makers, and land managers to input and manipulate data to assess the delivery, distribution, and economic value of ecosystem services and biodiversity.

IUCN Red List of Threatened Species

http://www.iucnredlist.org

The list of threatened taxa is maintained in a searchable database by the SSC Red List Programme as part of the SSC's Species Information Service (SIS). A subset of the records is provided here through the Search and Expert Search functions on the home page

Landscape Measures Resource Center

http://blogs.cornell.edu/lmrc/financial-contributo...

This resource center is a collection of ideas and tools for the better management of areas representing  a convergence in the following areas: protecting biodiversity, producing food, and securing rural livelihoods. It is part of a wider initiative run by Ecoagricultural Partners to help eco-agriculture practitioners measure the social, economic, and ecological outcomes of landscape-scale management