Quartz

October 26, 2022
With little to no progress made in halting and reversing catastrophic biodiversity loss in the past few years, hundreds of companies have stepped up demands for regulations to increase transparency and accountability.

Businesses must be compelled to “assess and disclose their impacts and dependencies on biodiversity by 2030,” more than 330 firms and financial institutions from 56 countries said in an open letter published today (Oct. 26), organized by the Business for Nature coalition and addressed to world leaders. The signatories include Sweden’s furniture giants IKEA, India’s Tata Steel, and French international banking group BNP Paribas, among others.

As some large businesses demand regulations, other big companies have been linked to lobbying attempts to resist such laws. Currently, any biodiversity reportage is largely voluntary and scattered. The statement is urging governments “to transform the rules of the economic game and require business to act now” before COP15 in Montreal in December, where the new Global Biodiversity Framework will be formed.

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Reuters

October 25, 2022
Over 330 businesses on Wednesday urged world leaders to force large companies to assess and disclose their impact on nature by 2030, ahead of the COP15 global talks on biodiversity in December.

Signatories of the COP15 Business Statement, which include GSK (GSK.L), H&M Group (HMb.ST) and Nestle (NESN.S) and which have combined annual revenues of more than $1.5 trillion, said the world needed to move past voluntary reporting rules.

"Improving the health of our planet requires bold, decisive action from policymakers and businesses. Some progress has been made, but it's not enough," Rebecca Marmot, chief sustainability officer at consumer goods company Unilever (ULVR.L), said.

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Fast Company

August 8, 2022
Navigating the investment landscape is increasingly complex. Supply chain issues, soaring inflation, rising energy prices, spiraling cost of raw materials—the list goes on.

Increasingly, “alarming” levels of global biodiversity loss—or, in investment-speak, the permanent destruction of natural capital—must also be taken into account. In fact, the situation has reached a crisis point where investors are now recognizing the direct line of risk between their portfolios and the natural resources they depend on.

All is not lost. As investors finally start to quantify the risk of global biodiversity loss in terms of dollars, it could spark the level of change that has been so urgently needed for so long. Indeed, investment is now being billed as a key area of debate at the upcoming UN COP-15 summit on biodiversity.

Alongside the significant economic opportunity there is of course also a climate imperative on financial companies to halt the ecological destruction of the Earth. Thankfully, these companies are starting to take notice and establish roots in the movement to reverse biodiversity loss.

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World Economic Forum

July 25, 2022
A recent report from The Environment Agency found a quarter of England’s mammals and almost a fifth of UK plants are threatened with extinction. With only an abysmal 50% of biodiversity remaining, the UK today ranks in the bottom ten of all countries globally. The present situation may look grim, but the future is potentially bleaker if we don’t act fast. The UN predicts the colossal extinction of one million species by 2039 - it’s clear we need to take action now to drive the change in the world, and humanity’s very survival, needs.

The absence of an urgent response from global leaders to the crisis has taken the loss of the world’s biodiversity to a crisis point, as it now poses as great a risk to humanity as global warming. Ongoing deprioritisation over more immediate global problems, such as the cost of living crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic has stagnated action and accelerated the loss of biodiversity. The delaying of the world’s foremost biodiversity conference, the COP15 summit, four times is proof of this. But humanity sleepwalking into extinction is a disaster, even if it takes fifteen years, and is worthy of urgent global attention.

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The CSR Journal

November 20, 2021
We face unprecedented challenges in our world today. The ongoing once-in-a-generation pandemic, to increasingly extreme weather events causing devastation at local and regional scales. The climate crisis causing disasters around the world is due to the imbalance of the carbon cycle, and increase in greenhouse gases from human activity.

The sixth IPCC (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report cements the science on the causes. In addition, human activity also has terraformed Earth’s landscapes destroying the natural ecosystems causing biodiversity decline. This further harms the ability of our regenerative Earth systems to maintain stability.

The imbalances in the biosphere affect nature and way of life. The current economic pathway is directly in conflict with nature. It is the source of our life, livelihoods, and economy. Strengthening nature inclusive thinking in business decisions creates a resilient future.

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The Print

July 26, 2021
Climate action failure, biodiversity loss and infectious diseases counted as the top three risks in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report. It is imperative that leaders and citizens alike adopt a systems view for the economic and societal transformation needed today so we build the world we want to inhabit in 2030.

In 2015, world leaders came together for an ambitious commitment on fighting climate change to keep the world on a 1.5C pathway. In addition to governments that committed to the Paris Agreement, businesses aligned their plans and commitments to this vision. Companies with a combined revenue of over $11.4 trillion (equivalent to more than half of US GDP), are now pursuing net zero emissions by the end of the century, majority by 2050.

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Edie

July 7, 2021
More than 100 investors, including the likes of Aviva and M&G Investments, representing $4.2trn in assets under management have written to some of the world's biggest banks, calling on them to strengthen climate and biodiversity targets this year.

Convened through the ShareAction coalition, 115 investors have written to 63 leading banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, calling on them to beef up environmental commitments ahead of key summits this year.

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Business Green

August 28, 2020
Investors and businesses seeking guidance on how to harness nature based solutions to boost profits and meet sustainability objectives can draw on a new report, titled Nature based solutions to the climate crisis, published yesterday by the Manchester-based Ignition project.

The report analyses a range of nature-based solutions to construction and urban planning challenges: street trees, green roofs and walls, urban parks and green spaces, and sustainable drainage systems.

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edie

July 27, 2020
Scientists have mapped the entirety of the planet's terrestrial habitat, creating a resource that will help businesses and investors measure and minimize their impacts on natural resources and biodiversity.

The map, which claims to be the first of its kind, was published in the journal Biological Conservation late last week following extensive research from scientists at the UN’s Environment Programme arm (UNEP). Before its publication, such in-depth data was only available for areas classed as ‘protected’ and ‘key for biodiversity, which are accountable for just 15.1% and 8.8% of land respectively.

It maps whether each square kilometre of land is classified as ‘natural’ or ‘modified’ – natural habitats being those which have not been created by humans or significantly altered by development activity. As such, users can identify where existing projects can be expanded, or new ones began, with the smallest impact on habitats possible.

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World Economic Forum

July 14, 2020
The Future of Nature and Business, the second of three reports in the World Economic Forum’s New Nature Economy series, provides the practical insights needed to take leadership in shifting towards a much needed nature-positive economy.

As the world prepares to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting crisis, we are presented with an unprecedented clarion call, and opportunity, to change the way we eat, live, grow, build and power our lives to achieve a carbon-neutral, ‘nature-positive’ economy and halt biodiversity loss by 2030. Business as usual is no longer an option.

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edie

April 8, 2020
Pernod Ricard's vice president of global sustainability Vanessa Wright discusses the company's approach to regenerative agriculture and biodiversity and why more people will be focusing on natural climate solutions moving forward.

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Business Green

March 12, 2020
Corporate investment in carbon offsets is helping to fund a project in West Africa that is delivering on multiple Sustainable Development Goals through its protection of precious forest habitats and its services for local communities.

The Upper Guinean Forest of West Africa is one of only three forested biodiversity hotspots in Africa. Until the end of the 19th century it covered most of Sierra Leone, Liberia, South-East Guinea, Southern Ivory Coast and South-West Ghana, but less than a fifth of this rainforest remains today.

The Greater Gola Landscape, straddling the Sierra Leone-Liberia border comprises the largest remnant of this critical ecosystem - over 350,000 hectares in a mosaic of protected areas, community forests, and smallholders' agricultural lands.

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Ethical Corporation

March 3, 2020
Angeli Mehta reports on how companies like Danone, Unilever, and China's Cofco International are addressing biodiversity loss through platforms like the Business for Nature coalition and One Planet Business for Biodiversity

This decade has been billed as the decade of climate action – but it’s not enough to cut carbon emissions, we also have to reverse the precipitous loss of our planet’s biodiversity.

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World Economic Forum

February 25, 2020
At the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos in January this year, there was unprecedented interest in and commitment to fighting the climate and nature emergencies facing humanity. Although the world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things by weight, humanity has already caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of all plants. Supporting the concept of stakeholder capitalism, leading CEOs, government leaders and heads of civil society organizations came together in the Swiss Alps to galvanize support for an integrated nature action agenda across the issues of climate, biodiversity, forests, oceans and sustainable development.

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GreenBiz

February 24, 2020
It’s 2020. We’ve officially entered the defining decade to tackle the climate crisis. As businesses ramp up climate action commitments through science-based targets and net-zero or carbon neutral goals, they are realizing there are untapped opportunities to work with nature instead of against it. Nature-based climate solutions will provide the lever of change to make faster progress toward those goals, and it just might help them go above and beyond.

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