ZNU researchers visited suppliers and agricultural producers last week as part of the BioVal project together with project partner Seeberger GmbH. The aim of the visits was to find out how biodiversity is dealt with and how work can be done together to further advance the protection of biodiversity. Suppliers in Chile and Portugal were visited.
The BioVal project aims to develop instruments and management tools to protect and promote biodiversity along the value chains of products. In the Living Lab with Seeberger GmbH, we are investigating how supplier management can be further developed in this respect. Therefore, questionnaires developed by Seeberger as part of the project, which place biodiversity in the context of the company’s own sustainability management, served as the basis for researching biodiversity. Accompanying interviews were conducted for the accompanying research. The insights gained are now being incorporated into the further development of the questionnaires.
It was impressive to see that some of the suppliers visited already see biodiversity as an integral part of their own sustainability management and that many optimization measures are already being implemented and others are being planned. But biodiversity is also on the agenda of other suppliers, and measures to protect biodiversity are to be successively introduced. The suppliers were therefore also very interested in the BioVal research project.
The visits were very informative and on this basis it will be possible not only to further develop Seeberger’s toolkit, but also to draw conclusions for biodiversity management in general.