This is the fourth in our series of Insights under the banner ‘Research that Resonates’ in which we introduce a recently published research or scholarly article that may be of interest to our readers and to our work in global development and sustainable impact, but typically sits behind a paywall. Our Insights are an attempted bridge to that work, and we encourage readers to examine the original articles in our series for depth and further examination.
Resonance co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) Steve Schmida meets quarterly with sustainability officers (SOs) and leaders as part of our Sustainable Impact roundtable series, many with heavily invested AG supply chains, to gain firsthand insights on what they are experiencing as they address breakpoint change in the face of wicked problems like climate change and sustainability.
Given this ongoing and valued dialogue, there was little surprise when the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) held in Montreal December 2022 resulted in a multi-national pledge to address potential mass extinction of many plant, insect, and animal species across the globe. SOs had been anticipating the addition of biodiversity goal integration and inclusion of measurement and roadmaps to their already ambitious undertakings as part of sustainability, ESG, and Scope emissions goals and initiatives.
The Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework is a historic global framework to safeguard nature and halt and reverse biodiversity loss, putting nature on a path to recovery by 2050. In the US, President Biden signed an EO, commonly known as the “30x30,” committing the country to protect and conserve 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.
Experts and stakeholders agree the overarching goals as conceived are ambitious, and that in addition to collaboration across the globe, meeting landmark aims will require innovative capital investment and financing mechanisms. Also understood is that to achieve benchmarks, strategic, cross-sector partnerships and a commitment to capacity-building that is inclusive and equitable may result in the most meaningful outcomes, if not the most enduring sustainable impact over time.
This will require not only the development of metrics, which like biodiversity, will be complex and thus immensely challenging, but also an expansive governance toolkit that leverages innovative approaches, strategies, and tech transfer that works, can be tailored, scaled, and by necessity, with some degree of expediency.
In writing about these requisites and imagining all that SOs must address as part of their respective organization’s commitments, one thing is clear: it’s a tall order.
In introducing their timely January 2023 article in Biological Conservation entitled, Mainstreaming Biodiversity in Business Decisions: Taking Stock of Tools and Gaps, Drs. Pamela Giselle Katic, Stefania Cerretelli, Jeremy Haggar, Truly Santika, and ConorWalsh recognize the lively debate over best practices and strategies that has been taking place even before the emergence of 30x30.
The authors call attention to the significant growth in recent years in the adoption of tools for mainstreaming biodiversity into business decisions across a variety of sectors as a requisite for promoting sustainable business. This is a nod not only to the fact biodiversity considerations and impacts are inherently part of many organizations’ operations and supply chains, but also noting in parallel to UN SDGs, ESG, and Scope Emissions work, there is growing external momentum for the private sector to compete on non-price-factors.
Factoring in social and environmental sustainability alongside economic drivers holds the promise, many believe and the authors affirm in sentiment, to incentivize the adoption of enduring sustainable impact practices that will result in impelling ‘business’ to play a greater role in biodiversity conservation.
The research team offers in their published work a broad overview of current trends across a selection of tools and approaches that assess biodiversity performance across different businesses by “measuring risk, dependencies, and impacts (positive and negative) for internal decision-making (e.g., relating to risk management and accounting), and/or to meet a variety of external reporting requirements (e.g., certification, non-financial disclosure, and regulation).”
Their approach includes a thorough literature review (and the published works and debates on metrics and tools is plentiful) and interviews of tool developers to assess how tools are constructed, how they measure biodiversity performance, how and where they are being used by different organizations, and how they contribute to achieving international targets for biodiversity.
In defining ‘tools,’ the authors suggest broad parameters, stating most share similar aims of providing an assessment or score of the impact associated with an organization’s activities and/or performance, and include methodologies that accept information on user activities and their relevant regional context.
These translated ‘biodiversity impact scores’ are typically based on one of two overarching schematics: (1) performance against established threshold conditions (e.g., the number of endangered species), or (2) a characterization process (i.e., assuming a defined relationship between activity and impact).
Tools may have additional objectives, note the authors, associated with determining dependence on biodiversity or impact of conservation or restoration activities.
The research team emphasized the fact that there has been a “proliferation of research and practice multistakeholder initiatives, platforms and coalitions to advance the development and uptake of biodiversity measurement approaches and tools by businesses and financial institutions.” These include, among others:
Other consortia, the authors add, have developed guidance more recently to assist business organizations in the assessment of the risks and opportunities that biodiversity presents to their strategy within a broader sustainability scope. This includes the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD, 2017), the ISEAL Alliance (ISEAL, 2020), the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB, 2021), and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures' LEAP approach (TNFD, 2022).
With the recent COP15 agreement and published Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework, as well as the 30x30 initiative, it is anticipated there may be more guidance and oversight emerging, which will certainly add to potential uncertainty among companies as actors in the space grapple with challenges like standardization, consistency, equity, inclusion, risks, costs, governance, decision-making agency, and the uncertainty of complex, dynamic, fragile, and unpredictable, intertwined natural systems.
These are some of the challenges our clients and sustainability leaders are facing.
The authors utilize as their theoretical framework a ‘company-centered intra-organizational value creation model.’ Without explaining in great depth (we encourage you to explore by reading the full article if you are interested), their examination began with an assessment of an organization’s rationale to respond strategically to biodiversity risk, which includes deliberate attention to both a company’s impacts and dependencies on natural capital as equally important strategic constraints.
Through this lens, biodiversity and final ecosystem services are sources of risks and opportunities for an organization’s future financial position and financial performance. Biodiversity “decisions” then (which include identification, adaptation, and implementation of tools) include “links between business strategy, opportunities, value propositions, primary customers, key activities, and services offered and resources and costs.”
Add the authors, “This framework places business activities within a systems perspective where businesses may also seek to compensate for, offset and mitigate their impacts.”
After assessing 33 of the most widely-used tools by the private sector using a rapid scoping exercise and characterizing the tools according to function, scale, and sector of interest, 14 tools were selected for an in-depth review. This narrowing down was intended to enable comparison of tools that perform similar functions across three critical sectors, (1) agriculture; (2) forestry; and (3) use of freshwater ecosystem services.
Following this review, the authors offered several key findings and discussion including the following key takeaways that resonate with the work we do at Resonance, and of what we hope is interest among the sustainability leaders with whom we collaborate:
As businesses seek to mainstream biodiversity in business decisions, the authors note there are several approaches, each reliant on several considerations. These include:
In further discussion and conclusion, the authors note that the although their paper does not aim to answer the critical question - "What are the actual impacts of these initiatives on biodiversity, and where are these impacts occurring,” it does in its assessment of tools linked with commonly-used indicators of the 'state of biodiversity' offer a first step to better understanding the potential contribution of tools to biodiversity conservation.
At the same time, there is immense work to be done to support and require businesses to internalize externalities and integrate their impact and dependencies on biodiversity in decision-making. This requires suggest the authors, a “scale-up of efforts for the development and operationalization of frameworks to harmonize methods and standards within an integrated business management approach, rather than an isolated or ad-hoc approach to tool use.”
Even with this aim, it is critical to understand that tools are only partially aligned with global targets for biodiversity protection. With growing pressures and new global commitments, the authors advise:
"There is a growing need to develop a common view among key stakeholders on the measurement, monitoring, and disclosure of corporate biodiversity impact and dependencies to help integrate more credible and comprehensive indicators of corporate contribution to global biodiversity goals into corporate reporting and global policy frameworks.”
They suggest we are on that very cusp of this reality, with exciting initiatives evolving to mainstream biodiversity considerations as part of business practices to advance conservation. They echo a universal call for ongoing research and collaboration around standardization debates, policy options, capacity building, cross-sector partnerships, research, innovation and implementation funding (including often marginlized communities impacted), and a concerted effort to generate evidence on how to assess and address critical capacity gaps.
The sustainability leaders participating in our roundtables have expressed the same, and we hope to be integral to this important cross-sector work of driving long-lasting and meaningful sustainable impact at the nexus of climate change and biodiversity.