The idea is to include a quantification and qualification of "biodiversity loss" into the production processes and their costs and benefits analysis. The focus is agricultural goods.

Our goal is to reduce the pressure that agriculture puts on the environment and biodiversity, which means we are aiming to promote sustainable agricultural processes through internalising biodiversity costs.

Biodiversity has no monetary value yet and is not included in any cost and benefit analysis when dealing with production processes. To ensure that any production process is not only economically beneficial to the society but also environmentally sound, biodiversity has to be included. The focus is on agricultural food production. 

The reason to protect biodiversity is that it supports ecosystem services that are important for resilience of any ecosystem. One example can be given by grassland: grassland has a high capacity of stopping chemical residues to enter groundwater level. It is important that those functions are recognised as part of our economy so that on the long-term food production is secured and soil is protected. 

Quantifying and qualifying the damage to biodiversity is necessary. An Environmental Impact Assessment is necessary to compare the situation before the company started its agricultural practices and what happened after their appearance in the region. By doing this, a way to quantify biodiversity influence/loss is possible. 

Making companies pay higher internalised costs, they should be incentivised to find a way to reduce their pressure on the environment. There should be governmental aid for restructuring production processes towards a more sustainable system. In this way, companies will remain and not move to different regions where environmental harmful practices are not "penalised."

The government should provide information of a standardised system that enhances sustainable production processes so companies can implement these practices. Environmental modelling is an important tool that can ease the process of quantifying the losses. ECOECOMOD may be one tool that can be used which determines the compensation payments for a given budget and defines the influences on a specific species that shall be protected. 

Some of the standards that are valid for all production processes are:

1. Local and regional production so that transportation costs are lower

2. Enhancement of organic farming so that use of fertilisers and other chemicals are reduced. 

3. Polycultural plantation must be supported as monocultural systems decrease biodiversity and use a lot of chemical supplements. It must be avoided that farmers plant only one crop type on a large-scale. It is more sensible to crop different types of crops as the system will get more resistant regarding external changes. The use of fertilisers will decrease, thus, costs are saved. 

4. A label system is developed. All companies that are not changing their practices after evaluating their pressure on biodiversity, will be marked with a label. 

 

It must be said that it crucially depends on the model whether the parameters are determined properly. It is hard to quantify biodversity and its losses. This is something that only a software tool can generate. 

However, the development of such a tool is important as businesses cannot be convinced in changing their behaviour if profits through sustainable maintenance of the agricultural activities are not reasoned with numbers. R&D must be supported in this framework.