This Smartphone Company Open-Sourced Its Biodiversity Method
Fairphone’s Amsterdam headquarters employs about 135 people, and in March the company published what it calls the first assessment of nature and biodiversity impact in consumer electronics manufacturing, then released the entire method for anyone to copy. Two weeks later the EU’s Omnibus I directive took effect, narrowing the reporting rules that cover biodiversity impacts to companies with more than 1,000 employees and more than €450 million in net annual turnover.
Nature disclosure has become something a company opts into. The companies with the strongest nature story to tell are also the ones with the least data infrastructure for telling it.
What Fairphone published
The 53-page assessment uses the Science Based Targets Network framework as its foundation and completes the first two of SBTN’s five steps, assess and prioritize. Fairphone combined public datasets including ENCORE, IBAT and the WWF Risk Tool with its own life cycle assessment data, then had the method reviewed by an outside consultancy and five other electronics companies before publishing it.
About 75% of a smartphone’s environmental impact happens before the phone reaches a customer. Mineral extraction carries the highest risk to ecosystems anywhere in the chain. Fairphone started from 68 minerals it had already profiled, narrowed to 11 priority minerals, assessed 74 mining regions across 33 countries, and named 11 hotspots in eight countries where extraction poses the greatest risk to local ecosystems, including Minas Gerais in Brazil for gold and iron and Palawan Island in the Philippines for nickel. Chief Impact Officer Monique Lempers described the industry as having been “optimising for carbon” while overlooking the systems that keep the planet functioning.
Fairphone’s methodology annex makes an argument that applies to any company doing impact accounting. The earpiece in a Fairphone 5 accounts for 0.02% of the phone’s total water use, which reads like a rounding error until Fairphone converts it to 54 kilograms of water. The USB-C connector is 0.25% of the total and 124 kilograms. Fairphone argues for measuring nature pressures in absolute terms instead of as a share of product impact, because a component can be negligible in a pie chart and material to a watershed.
The tools do not have a category for plant-based food yet
Founders building plant-based companies run into a sharper version of this. When Alpro, the plant-based brand owned by Danone, ran that same first step as part of SBTN’s 17-company validation pilot, it found no International Standard Industrial Classification category for plant-based foods in the tools the materiality assessment depends on. Secondary data for plant-based products was thin, so Alpro collected primary data instead. On tree-crop ingredients the pilot turned up a real conflict, since SBTN’s land footprint reduction target and its freshwater targets can pull against each other when yield gains require more water and more chemical input.
Data availability decided outcomes across that pilot. Freshwater quantity targets were approved at a rate of 90%. Freshwater quality targets, which depend on nutrient pollution data, were approved at 40%.
Why the stakes are higher in this sector
SBTN calls the global food system the number one cause of biodiversity loss. Chatham House’s 2021 research paper identified agriculture as a threat to 24,000 of the 28,000 species then documented by the IUCN as at risk of extinction. In February 2026 IPBES approved its first Business and Biodiversity Assessment, three years of work by 79 experts from 35 countries endorsed by more than 150 governments, and it found that methods for measuring business impact on nature already exist while uptake of them stays low and uneven across sectors.
Market demand for that information kept building while the regulatory version shrank. TNFD counted more than 733 organizations across 56 countries committed to nature-related reporting as of November 2025, including asset managers overseeing $22.4 trillion. The Council describes Omnibus I as limiting the trickle-down effect of these obligations onto smaller companies, which leaves the question of what a large buyer can still ask a small supplier for.
What to watch
SBTN plans to release version two of its freshwater guidance later this year, expanding scope to groundwater and pesticides, which reaches further into plant-based ingredient sourcing than the current version does. Fairphone has joined SBTN’s freshwater pilot as an observer alongside Symrise and John Lewis Partnership, and SBTN’s methods stay free to use with no registration. The first plant-based company to run them will not have to invent the approach.
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