Using Migratory Data to Guide Proactive Corporate Stewardship

In a world of increasing complexity, corporates and financial institutions are grappling with a new frontier of risk and opportunity: nature-related data. The global economy is a complex web of interconnected supply chains, and increasingly, we’re realising that these threads aren’t just logistical, they’re ecological. The fate of a migratory bird, for example, provides crucial insights into the resilience of global operations.

Billions of migratory birds travel thousands of miles each year, weaving invisible threads that connect diverse ecosystems across the globe. The Afro-Siberian Red Knot bird travels from West African wetlands to Siberia, while the Blackpoll Warbler journeys from North American natural spaces to South American rainforests. However, these spectacles are more than a marvel of nature. Migratory species are powerful indicators of ecological health and financial risk across global supply chains.

For global corporations reliant on international and complex supply chains, understanding the impact bird migration has on their operations is crucial. By monitoring their movements, businesses can gain crucial insights into nature-related risks, from operational disruptions to regulatory non-compliance, ensuring greater supply chain resilience. 

Biodiversity intelligence platforms provide accurate insights into the links between migratory birds and ecological conditions, driving decision-making and helping organisations minimise risks to their global operations.

How Migratory Species are Indirectly Intertwined with Global Corporations

For many threads of the global economy such as financial risk and international supply chain sustainability, ecological interactions are critical in providing valuable insights. Migratory species are powerful indicators of ecological health and its impact on elements that propagate financial risk. 

In today’s interconnected economy, global supply chains can unravel, even when ecological crises occur in a single landscape. In agroforestry, deforestation, habitat destruction, and heavy insecticide use do more than wear down ecosystems. They weaken harvests, cause yields to diminish, and inflate sourcing costs. For corporations, this leads to significant financial strain due to rising crop sourcing costs and translates to limited capacity to reinvest in farming itself.

Biodiversity data and migratory bird insights can drive decision-making, conservation efforts, and crop cultivation, providing a critical understanding of global operations. The life of a waterbird, for instance, is used as an indicator species at the flyway scale, according to a study completed by Colorado State University and the Centre d’Ecologie Evolutive Campus. 

Data collated by these researchers also revealed that increased conservation efforts of wetlands directly correlated with flood water retention. However, these observations are not only ecologically impactful. They reflect financial gains, seen in the growth and cultivation of healthy crops.

Alongside this, the journeys of migratory bird species like the Baltimore Oriole and the Wood Thrush are more than seasonal phenomena. Their presence or decline reveals the health of the forests and farmlands and signals financial risks to the supply chains that rely on them. The Baltimore Oriole, for example, cumulatively declined 36% between 1966 and 2019.

Insecticides affect not only the Baltimore Oriole and Wood Thrush population, but also the quality and quantity of crop yields, creating a ripple effect through the international supply chain for global corporations. Monitoring the Baltimore Oriole’s population decline, however, provides insights into the use of insecticides in specific geographical locations that are crucial for understanding international supply chains in greater depth. 

Hidden Zone for Corporate Companies: Unmanaged Risks in Unseen Pathways

While corporations understand the importance of sustainability, their ability to address and navigate transnational ecological impacts – signals and insights they must increasingly rely on – often falls short. Migratory shifts, habitat decline, environmental risks, and other signs of disruption remain inaccessible without advanced biodiversity platforms, and the damaging effects of supply chain disruption and environmental decline remain difficult to track. The result is that corporations experience multiple unmanaged business risks:

• Reputational Damage – In a world where environmental risks can impact the reputation of a business, monitoring an organisation’s environmental footprint or the decline of habitats through migratory species observation is critical. In the case of the Malaysia-based palm oil company IOI, for example, its mismanagement of environmental risks impacted its investors and customers severely. The corporation was suspended from the palm oil industry’s certification body for specific actions on its plantations. Namely, the deforestation and burning of peatlands destroyed the habitats of various types of wildlife, including migratory birds. Consequently, multiple brands like Nestle and Ferrero no longer use IOI as their supplier, according to The Understory.
• Inability to Meet Comprehensive ESG Reporting Standards – Corporations must meet environmental, social, and governance reporting standards that align with their corporate sustainability responsibility in today’s regulated corporate world. They also must comply with the Science Based Targets Network SBTN target setting if they belong to the Science Based Targets initiative. Without a comprehensive understanding of nature-related risks or data that translates environmental performance into sustainability reporting processes, corporations cannot fully meet the Task Force on Nature-Related Financial Disclosure or ESG reporting standards.

Mapping the Unseen with Global Connecting Data

By visualising migratory pathways, corporations can discover how habitat risks develop into supply chain risks. Biodiversity intelligence platforms layer each of these pathways with supplier locations and regional conservation statuses. The results are precise insights into ecological strain across vast distances, delivered through specialised data types and dedicated features. 

• GPS Tracking – GPS tracking returns biodiversity data specific to a species once a global corporation accesses the tracking location-based datasets, facilitating species monitoring. This tracking enables businesses to gain insights into migratory bird patterns and habitats, identifying the health of their supply chain. 
• Bioacoustics – Corporations retrieve bioacoustic data points from biodiversity platforms, obtaining insights from collated data on the vocalisation of birds and acoustic indicators of the environment. Such indicators are more than ecological insights: global businesses use these insights to detect and measure the species’ populations within a specific zone that is critical for their supply chain and subsequent sustainable finance.
• Habitat Mapping from Remote Sensing – Global corporations utilise data collected via drones, aircraft, or satellites that is gathered in a biodiversity platform to track and assess the changing ecological patterns. Appraising such changing patterns, environmental assets, and ecosystem health facilitates the process of understanding the resilience of global operations and their global supply chain over time. 

How NatureHelm Maps the Migratory Story

Globally mapping bird migrations is more than a generic exercise – it requires a corporation to navigate a scope of fragmented datasets and research sourced from remote locations. It is unlike interpreting static nature metrics and requires data synthesis across continents. As a result, multinational corporations face the crucial challenge of making these bird migration data actionable for corporate decision makers. 

To address these complexities, NatureHelp integrates site-specific and global datasets and translates them into the following business intelligence features:

• Aggregation of Diverse Global Data – Diverse global data aggregation includes billions of data points on species located in various regions, and translating this into significant, valuable insights for international corporations.
• Global Reporting – Global biodiversity reporting involves the option to retrieve accessible reports through advanced biodiversity platforms, with the reports revealing insights on the impacts on biodiversity, helping companies comply with TNFD, CSRD, and other frameworks. 
• Insights into Risk or Opportunities – Biodiversity data platforms provide insights into risks and opportunities in the context of habitat assessment. They provide nature and biodiversity data on elements that pose risks to various species’ habitats, in turn making it easier for sustainability leaders to complete targeted interventions.

From Global Insight to Local Action: Proactive Stewardship

NatureHelm helps global organisations visualise the connections between ecosystem health and the supply chain to make productive, data-driven decisions. Corporations have insights into supply chain risks and adjust their approach to handling material shortages, managing delays in crop yields, and ensuring their revenue is not compromised by nature-related financial risks. These platforms aid in:

• Restoration of Habitats Along Crucial Flyways – Corporations map stopover sites through biodiversity data platforms and, by monitoring areas in which species are declining, pivot and look to a new financial opportunity to avoid supply chain disruption. Corporations use such solutions to map flyways on a global scale, which aids in local biodiversity restoration projects and global species needs.
• Engaging with Supply Chain Partners – Informing partners on best practices for broader biodiversity is facilitated when organisations access a visual representation of the link between migratory bird loss and crop yields or outputs. Data presented as a map through biodiversity platforms helps stakeholders gain insights into the business case for biodiversity.

Observing the Unseen and Impacts on a Global Supply Chain with NatureHelm

Global corporations rely on natural environments and must focus on operating with international supply chain sustainability insights. Bird migration patterns are key to deciphering planetary health and helping corporations turn abstract risks into actionable strategies. 

If you want to stay one step ahead of ecological decline, complete nature risk assessments to gain insights into corporate performance, and understand the environmental impact on your global supply chain, contact NatureHelm today.