Welcome to BENCHES
Biodiversity Assessment Tool for Sport
Partners
About the Tool
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:
biodiversity management in sports organisations,
biodiversity management in sports facilities,
biodiversity management by event organisers, and
biodiversity pressures generated by 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.
Assessment Flow
How It Works
The BENCHES tool is meant to be used periodically to track progress and drive continuous improvement. Event organisers should apply it during planning to reduce potential impacts and right after the event to evaluate actual impacts.
It follows three main steps:
1. Profiling
Define your organisation type, the ecosystem and sport type, and the focus of the assessment; if assessing a facility or event, provide its location for the context analysis.
2. Biodiversity Impact Assessment
Measure biodiversity impacts using KPIs based on the evaluation axes selected.
3. Results
Outcomes are shown as a percentage of the maximum score for each axis and as an overall aggregated score, the Biodiversity Assessment Index, which classifies users as beginner (<30%), intermediate (30–60%), or advanced (>60%). Users also receive data-quality feedback (e.g., skipped or "not applicable" responses).