“The BENCHES biodiversity assessment tool for sport helps sports organisations and event organisers identify, measure, and mitigate their biodiversity impacts across the entire value chain and different ecosystems. It is designed for easy use by practitioners without specialist knowledge and is structured around four independent axes that can be used separately or together for flexible yet comparable assessments over time and across contexts:
- Axis 1 – Biodiversity management within sports organisations.
- Axis 2 – Biodiversity management within sports facilities.
- Axis 3 – Biodiversity management by event organisers.
- Axis 4 – Biodiversity pressures of sporting events.
“The tool also includes a context analysis that considers how close facilities and event sites are to protected areas, key biodiversity areas, or large urban green spaces, which can increase the weight of local impacts and add extra management questions. Finally, it adapts assessments based on the ecosystem type (aquatic, terrestrial, or urban), adding ecosystem-specific questions for events.”
