CSDDD environmental due diligence: biodiversity, natural heritage and wetlands, site by site
The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (Directive (EU) 2024/1760) defines an adverse environmental impact by reference to its annex: an impact resulting from the breach of the prohibitions and obligations listed in Part I, points 15 and 16, and in Part II. Part II draws on international environmental instruments, among them the obligation under Article 10(b) of the Convention on Biological Diversity to avoid or minimise adverse impacts on biological diversity, obligations concerning natural heritage under the World Heritage Convention and wetlands under the international wetlands convention, and the CITES prohibitions. Identifying where a company's own sites and its chain of activities touch such places is the first step of the due diligence. ERWAY Legality Assessment takes it per site polygon.
After the Omnibus I amendments published in February 2026, the directive applies to companies with more than 5,000 employees and a net worldwide turnover above EUR 1.5 billion — and to non-EU companies above the same turnover generated in the Union — from 26 July 2029, with transposition due a year earlier. Companies of that size have thousands of sites in their chain of activities, and the identification step is a spatial one before it is anything else: which sites overlap a protected area, a World Heritage property, a protected wetland, a recognised Indigenous territory. The product answers that with one outcome per site and the record that supports it. The supplier-site screening page shows the bulk case; the International heritage designations and protected wetlands pages cover the two designations the annex names.
What the annex covers
Part II lists prohibitions and obligations drawn from international environmental instruments, in three groups: biodiversity and habitat protection, chemicals and waste, and pollution. The first group is the one that has a location: adverse impacts on biological diversity, on natural heritage properties and on wetlands are impacts on identifiable places, and the due diligence has to find those places before it can prevent, mitigate or end an impact on them.
What the screening establishes per site
Overlap with a protected area, its category and class, in hectares and as a share; relation to a World Heritage property, a Biosphere Reserve or a Global Geopark, with the footprint labelled approximate where it is a computed circle; relation to a protected wetland by official boundary or disc; tenure status and the consent flag where the site lies on Indigenous or community land. One outcome per site on a five-step scale, the strictest tier, and an export with every finding dated.
What remains the company's
The due diligence itself — the policy, the identification and prioritisation of impacts, the prevention and mitigation measures, the complaints procedure, the monitoring and the reporting. The screening does not decide whether an impact is adverse or whether an obligation has been breached; it says a designated place is present and what the record says it restricts. Where a national register is the authority, the page tells you to consult it.