Supplier site screening for manufacturers: one outcome for every supplier site
A manufacturer's biodiversity exposure is mostly upstream: the farms that grow the input, the quarries that supply the mineral, the plantations behind the rubber, the plants that make the component. ESRS E4 asks about value-chain sites in or near biodiversity-sensitive areas; the CSDDD, for the largest companies from 2029, asks for due diligence on adverse environmental impacts across the chain of activities, with the Convention on Biological Diversity, natural heritage and wetlands among the instruments in its annex; the TNFD's Locate phase asks for priority value-chain locations. All three start from the supplier's site polygons. ERWAY Legality Assessment screens them in bulk and gives one outcome per site.
Ask suppliers for the polygons at onboarding — a farm's fields, a factory's plot, a concession's boundary — and load them with the supplier code as the identity field. Five checks run per site in the background; the outcome by source says which sites overlap a protected area and by how many hectares, which lie on recognised Indigenous or community land and under what tenure, which sit inside or near a heritage site or a protected wetland with the footprint's confidence stated. A clean site never softens a finding on another, and a site whose checks are queued is never treated as clean. The CSDDD page details the directive's environmental annex; the ESRS E4 page covers the disclosure the record feeds.
At onboarding, not after the audit
A supplier whose site sits in a strictly protected area is a finding at tier 1 the day the polygon arrives, not a surprise in an audit two years later. The screening runs on the supplier's own geometry, so the finding names the area, the class, the hectares and the share, and the sourcing team can ask for the permit or the consent document with the record in hand. The sourcing-led tour walks through exactly this case.
One record for three frameworks
The same per-site record serves ESRS E4's value-chain question, the CSDDD's identification of actual and potential adverse environmental impacts, and the TNFD Locate phase's priority locations. Each is a different reader of the same fact — whether a supplier site is in or near a designated area, and whose land it is — and the export carries that fact with its source and its date into each file.
What remains the manufacturer's
The supplier's own permits and the audit that reads them; the impact assessment; the engagement and the corrective action. The screening is preliminary against international records and is labelled as such; where the country of the site keeps its own register, that register is the authority. What it settles is which of a thousand supplier sites need a document before the next order.