Why biodiversity loss is rising up the corporate agenda

The Unit­ed Nations held anoth­er COP con­fer­ence this year, a much-post­poned gath­er­ing that addressed nature loss. The Octo­ber 2021 ses­sion of the Con­ven­tion on Bio­log­i­cal Diver­si­ty (CBD COP15) in Kun­ming, Chi­na, is like­ly to be eclipsed by the far larg­er cli­mate-change jam­boree in Glas­gow, espe­cial­ly as it was a vir­tu­al event for many del­e­gates. When it comes to tack­ling the crises fac­ing the plan­et, address­ing bio­di­ver­si­ty loss has always been in the shad­ow of cut­ting CO2 emis­sions, but events this year are final­ly push­ing it into the spot­light.

“You can­not sep­a­rate cli­mate change and bio­di­ver­si­ty loss. It’s not an either/or mat­ter,” argues Eva Zabey, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Busi­ness for Nature, a coali­tion of com­pa­nies and con­ser­va­tion groups. 

Her organ­i­sa­tion was behind an open let­ter – signed by a dozen promi­nent busi­ness lead­ers, includ­ing for­mer Unilever CEO Paul Pol­man (see p6) – sent to all heads of state before CBD COP15. This urged them to adopt an action­able frame­work for bio­di­ver­si­ty along the lines of the Paris accord on cli­mate change. 

In some respects, the move paid off. In what has become known as the Kun­ming dec­la­ra­tion, more than 100 nation­al gov­ern­ments pledged to place the pro­tec­tion of habi­tats at the heart of their deci­sion-mak­ing.

Pledges of this type have been made and bro­ken before, of course, but Zabey is opti­mistic. “Com­pa­nies need the polit­i­cal cer­tain­ty to move their invest­ment, acti­vate their inno­va­tion and shift their busi­ness mod­el,” she says, adding that they can­not be expect­ed to take the ini­tia­tive and act in iso­la­tion. “The lever for accel­er­at­ed com­mit­ments and more action from busi­ness will come from gov­ern­ment poli­cies.”

In Feb­ru­ary, HM Trea­sury pub­lished the final report of the inde­pen­dent review of the eco­nom­ics of bio­di­ver­si­ty, led by Sir Partha Das­gup­ta, emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge. The doc­u­ment is remark­able in sev­er­al ways, none more so than the fact that it was com­mis­sioned by the finance min­istry of one of the world’s lead­ing economies, not an NGO. 

The report’s over­rid­ing mes­sage is that our cur­rent way of life is unsus­tain­able. It argues that the val­ue of the goods and ser­vices pro­vid­ed by nature is not reflect­ed in their mar­ket price and that we need to start involv­ing nature in finan­cial deci­sions.

“Bal­ance sheets should not just include what a gov­ern­ment or busi­ness can gain by exploit­ing nature. They should also include what they will lose,” it states.

Dr Jonathan Barnard is CEO of the World Land Trust, an inter­na­tion­al con­ser­va­tion char­i­ty. He says that the report “does mark a shift in people’s think­ing. Das­gup­ta recog­nis­es that pro­tect­ing what we have would cost less than try­ing to restore it.”

The report catal­ysed a series of announce­ments that have helped to push bio­di­ver­si­ty issues cen­tre stage. In Sep­tem­ber, for instance, phil­an­thropists and investors com­mit­ted $5bn (£3.6bn) to nature restora­tion and con­ser­va­tion as part of the so-called 30 by 30 tar­get, which aims to pro­tect 30% of the planet’s land and water by 2030.

A month lat­er, the UN’s human rights coun­cil vot­ed to recog­nise the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sus­tain­able envi­ron­ment as a basic human right. And, in anoth­er bid to give com­bat­ing nature loss a stronger legal foot­ing, a for­mal def­i­n­i­tion of the crime of eco­cide (see pan­el) has also been pub­lished.

Barnard believes that these moves are huge­ly influ­en­tial. “Peo­ple could actu­al­ly start to claim that their human rights are being breached if gov­ern­ments per­mit cer­tain acts,” he says.

More than half of the world’s GDP is at mod­er­ate or high risk owing to nature loss, notes Zabey, who sees this fac­tor as a “strong eco­nom­ic case for busi­ness­es to step up”. But she adds that it’s not only a mat­ter of releas­ing green invest­ment. The whole finan­cial sys­tem needs to recog­nise the val­ue of nature, which needs to be embed­ded in every choice a com­pa­ny makes.

So what prac­ti­cal steps would Zabey rec­om­mend that busi­ness­es take? Assess, com­mit, act and advo­cate, she says. “Com­pa­nies need to ensure that they under­stand, mea­sure and val­ue their most mate­r­i­al impacts and depen­den­cies on nature.” 

Any com­mit­ments a firm makes should be ambi­tious and sup­port­ed by the lat­est research, lean­ing on ini­tia­tives such as the Glob­al Com­mons Alliance’s new sci­ence-based tar­gets for nature, Zabey says. “These will enable com­pa­nies to ensure that they’re oper­at­ing with­in the lim­its of the plan­et.”

Actions should be about restor­ing nature as well as min­imis­ing its deple­tion, while com­pa­nies also need to spread the word. Reg­u­la­tors and pol­i­cy-mak­ers sim­ply aren’t used to being con­tact­ed by com­pa­nies wish­ing to talk about nature loss, she says, so this sort of tac­tic could prove high­ly effec­tive.

In an exam­ple of con­cert­ed advo­ca­cy, more than 1,000 com­pa­nies, with a com­bined annu­al rev­enue of £3.4tn, have backed Busi­ness for Nature’s ‘Call to Action’ cam­paign, which urges gov­ern­ments to adopt a glob­al goal to halt and reverse nature loss before the end of the decade.

Sig­na­to­ries include H&M, which has com­mit­ted to achiev­ing a net-pos­i­tive impact on bio­di­ver­si­ty across its val­ue chain. It recent­ly start­ed a project with the World Wide Fund for Nature to help 6,000 small cot­ton farm­ers adopt agri­cul­tur­al prac­tices that could help to reverse bio­di­ver­si­ty loss, espe­cial­ly in key tiger habi­tats in cen­tral India.

The World Land Trust also works close­ly with busi­ness­es, includ­ing a new part­ner­ship with FTSE-100 com­pa­ny Spi­rax-Sar­co Engi­neer­ing, as part of a push on the rel­a­tive­ly new con­cept of land off­set­ting. As part of its sus­tain­abil­i­ty strat­e­gy, the Chel­tenham-based firm is cal­cu­lat­ing its land foot­print – the total space occu­pied by its glob­al oper­a­tions – and then fund­ing the sav­ing of the same area of habi­tat through the trust’s ‘Buy an Acre’ scheme.  

“For many com­pa­nies, land is the sim­ple met­ric,” Barnard says. “Pro­tect that and every­thing else fol­lows.” 

How harming nature could be criminalised

In June, an inde­pen­dent pan­el of legal experts drew up a def­i­n­i­tion of eco­cide, which they hope will be adopt­ed by the Inter­na­tion­al Crim­i­nal Court.

One of the main aims of an eco­cide law would be to bring to jus­tice busi­ness lead­ers who know­ing­ly make deci­sions caus­ing severe envi­ron­men­tal dam­age, explains Jojo Mehta, co-founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of Stop Eco­cide Inter­na­tion­al, which con­vened the pan­el.

“The idea is to crim­i­nalise seri­ous harm to nature at the high­est lev­el,” she says. “Once a law is in place, there will be pros­e­cu­tions, although the real point is that it’s a pro­tec­tive mea­sure. It also gives peo­ple a sense that dam­ag­ing nature is not just some­thing that’s an unfor­tu­nate side effect of eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty.”

Mak­ing eco­cide a crime is a way of cre­at­ing a coher­ent set of glob­al rules that cross bor­ders, address­ing the fact that many of the biggest pol­luters are multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions, accord­ing to Mehta. She believes that, while it will take at least four years before the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty starts adopt­ing leg­is­la­tion, the process is inevitable. 

“It’s impor­tant that organ­i­sa­tions know it’s com­ing. Com­pa­nies will start steer­ing in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion,” she pre­dicts. “Once you make some­thing a crime, you cre­ate a taboo. That’s des­per­ate­ly need­ed, of course – we need to be recoil­ing from seri­ous harm to the envi­ron­ment.”

Mehta also believes that with oth­er legal devel­op­ments such as the adop­tion of a clean envi­ron­ment as a human right, the court­room could become the new front line in con­ser­va­tion. 

“There’s a grow­ing aware­ness that some­thing struc­tur­al needs to be done,” she says. “At the moment, with all the good­will and ambi­tion in the world, we’re still only crawl­ing in the new direc­tion.”