From local species monitoring to global value chain impacts: A starting point for assessing biodiversity impacts of higher education institutions

The loss of biodiversity threatens global environmental stability and socio-economic resilience. The protection of ecosystems and their services through habitat conservation and species preservation requires all stakeholders to assess and disclose their impacts on biodiversity. Higher education institutions (HEIs) play a critical role in this, acting as research centres, educators, sustainability leaders, and stewards of local ecosystems. Although many organizations monitor their carbon footprints, biodiversity and habitat assessments remain underutilized in decision-making, despite their importance in identifying conservation priorities and supporting nature-positive strategies. This study compares insights from a direct, campus-level biodiversity survey (BioBlitz) with those of an indirect, consumption-based, environmentally extended input–output life cycle assessment (EEIO-LCA). While local surveys yield site-specific, actionable data, they often lack systematic coverage and baseline reference conditions. By contrast, EEIO-LCA identifies procurement-related biodiversity pressures but suffers from aggregation and limited ecological interpretability. Integrating these complementary perspectives remains challenging due to mismatches in scale and metrics. We discuss a pathway towards integration through harmonized habitat baselines, improved supplier and regional data granularity, regionalized characterization factors, and hybrid LCA approaches. A staged roadmap that strengthens each method independently, standardizes uncertainty translation, and cautiously tests bridging indicators can guide HEIs towards robust, integrated biodiversity accounting. By contributing our baseline and discussion to the Nature Positive Universities Alliance's common repository of methods and case studies, we can benchmark progress, harmonize data standards (e.g. supplier origin disclosure, monitoring design) and co-create scalable interventions. • Higher education institutions are vital to biodiversity conservation, as educators and sustainability leaders. • Study compares BioBlitz and EEIO-LCA to find complementarities and integration challenges. • Integration needs a staged approach, strengthening methods before testing bridging indicators.