Exploring Interdependencies Between Biodiversity, Ecosystems, and Economic Sectors: A Reverse Approach to Double Materiality in Sweden's Boreal Forests.

Abstract

Forests cover about a third of the global land area and provide society with essential ecosystem services, but are under increasing pressure. Despite growing corporate engagement with sustainability, this progress is not reflected in the state of the planet, where ecological decline continues. Existing frameworks cannot resolve this micro-macro disconnect: firm-level frameworks, such as the double materiality assessment (DMA) required under the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), are too narrow to capture how entire sectors interact with a shared ecosystem, while global frameworks are often too broad to reflect an ecosystem's specific conditions within its national context. This thesis addresses that gap by proposing a Reverse DMA. Rather than starting from a single organisation, the analysis is grounded in the ecosystem itself, Sweden's boreal forests, mapping the material impacts and dependencies of Swedish sectors on it, following the ESRS E4 biodiversity and ecosystems standard. Using a semi-systematic review of peer-reviewed literature, grey literature, and corporate sustainability reports, evidence was coded against the ESRS E4 framework for five sectors: Forestry and Wood Products, Mining, Energy, Agriculture and Food, and Tourism and Recreation. The findings reveal that Forestry, Mining, and Energy are impact-dominant sectors, primarily through land conversion, habitat fragmentation, and pollution. Agriculture and Tourism are dependency-dominant, relying on ecosystem services such as reindeer forage, berry harvests, water and climate regulation, and recreational and cultural value. Beyond identifying and rating these interdependencies, the thesis finds a systematic underrepresentation of the dependency dimension, both in the available evidence and in the structure of ESRS E4 itself. This work offers a meso-level, ecosystem-centred complement to firm-level DMAs and global frameworks: a shared reference point for how sectors depend on and affect Sweden's boreal forests, and a clear avenue for future research on this underdeveloped dimension of sustainability reporting.