Biodiversity consultancy or screening tool: which one you need, and when
A biodiversity consultancy and a screening tool are not competitors; they work on different halves of the same question. The tool settles, in minutes and for every plot, whether there is anything protected to talk about. The consultancy determines what it means on the ground, what mitigation is possible and what the lender or the authority will accept. ERWAY Legality Assessment is the first half, and it is built to hand over cleanly to the second.
Commissioning a specialist for three hundred supplier plots, or for twelve candidate sites of which ten will be discarded, is not what consultancies are for. Run the screening first: the plots with no findings drop out, the plots with 'Verification needed' get a short list of what to confirm, and the plots with a prohibited or restricted finding go to the specialist with the record, the hectares and the map already attached. The IFC PS6 pre-screening page shows the hand-over for project finance.
What a desktop screening settles
Whether a plot overlaps a protected area, and by how many hectares. Whether it lies on recognised Indigenous or community land, and whether consent is documented. Whether it is inside, near or in the vicinity of a heritage site or a protected wetland, with the footprint's confidence stated. Which threatened species have been recorded inside the plot or within a kilometre. All of it per plot, dated, exportable, and the same for every plot in the set.
What a consultancy adds
A critical-habitat determination under IFC PS6. The field baseline and the survey that shows what is actually present. The appropriate assessment for a Natura 2000 site, the environmental impact study, the mitigation hierarchy and the offset design. The conversation with the authority and with the community. None of that is in the tool, and the tool makes this clear on every page — see its limits.
The hand-over
The export is the brief. CSV or GeoJSON per plot with every finding, its source, its tier, its overlap and the date the source was checked; the map with the overlapping part drawn. A consultant who starts from that file starts from the findings instead of from a blank map, and the client pays for judgement rather than for a first look. The screening tool page describes what that file contains.