A forum established to aid British companies to better understand their impact on nature and biodiversity expects 2023 to be a pivotal year for the organisation, a senior member told Carbon Pulse, as it aims to ramp up both membership with a focus on informing firms in the country about upcoming ‘net gain’ legislation, the opportunities around crediting outcomes, and dealing with global nature disclosure rules.

The UK Business and Biodiversity Forum (UKBBF) began its life three years ago, immediately prior to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, and has been gathering momentum over the past year with 2023 considered to be its first major year of activity, Edward Pollard, director at the organisation, told Carbon Pulse.

The body has now been registered as a Community Interest Company (CIC), and is backed by the United Kingdom International Chamber of Commerce (UK ICC), as it looks to build on its near-40 member companies and sponsors.

“We are essentially a business-to-business forum supporting UK companies to properly embed biodiversity and nature into their business models,” Pollard explained.

“We are coordinated by a steering group drawn from the members which will help to determine what the priorities are – so it will be quite member led.”

“At the moment, we are mainly focusing on information-sharing, both members sharing with members in a non-competitive way … as well as developing a collective voice,” he added.

There are three core subjects which companies have repeatedly raised so far during discussions and are likely to dominate the work of the body in the near-term: upcoming biodiversity net gain legislation in the UK, the burgeoning crediting market, and nature disclosure rules to be launched in September by the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD).

The UKBBF has also established what it has coined a ‘nature positive business pledge’, to which a firm can sign up and in doing so commit to halt and reverse impacts on nature, though it is currently not a prerequisite to becoming a member of the forum.

Members listed on the organisation’s website range oil major BP and engineering consultancy Mott MacDonald to smaller businesses such as a hairdressing salon in Oxford.

“We’re trying to make sure we get the full range of businesses. We have got to make sure we cover [small- and medium-sized enterprises] and not just the usual suspects,” Pollard stressed.

His other employer, green advisory company the Biodiversity Consultancy​, is also a member of the forum’s steering committee.

The UKBBF will not be a lobby group, but rather a coordinated point of contact for the private sector to communicate with bodies such as the department for environment, food and rural affairs (DEFRA) and Natural England, which together form much of the nature policy in the country.

“As much as we want to be about sharing information, we don’t want to dictate what our members do. The forum is about making sure that there is an open platform providing information to help companies make informed decisions along the way.”

On credits specifically, the organisation would initially serve as a means of demystifying the space for companies, given the expected emergence of various standards and methodologies later in the year, as well as the UK’s own mechanism, and the likelihood of the market initially being quite a confusing and fragmented environment.

“Biodiversity credits have piqued people’s interest but it is now about wanting to understand more about what they actually are and how they might be relevant to companies,” Pollard said, adding that questions were mostly from potential buyers at the moment.

He said he expected fresh announcements on biodiversity crediting could emerge during New York Climate Week in September, around COP28 in Dubai in November and December, and in Davos early next year during the World Economic Forum’s annual bash in the mountains of Switzerland.

NEXT STEPS

The UKBBF is just beginning to gain traction but there is already a roadmap for its future which will include moving from the current free membership to a paid model as early as September, Pollard confirmed.

“There is a lot of internal interest around just making sure that we become well-established. There is definitely going to be a metric of success to do with [ensuring] a stable income and getting to the point where we can improve based on the the membership [numbers] and the support that we’re getting.”

He added it would also be “useful” to have more financial sector members given the sector’s size in the UK economy.

In addition, the UKBBF’s eventual aim is to hire a dedicated secretariat, given that the current board works on the project on a part-time, voluntary basis.

Announcements may emerge in September when the forum plans to host an AGM.

Pollard underlined that progress has, so far, “exceeded our own expectations” in terms of gaining the awareness of bodies such as DEFRA, Natural England, and large UK industry groups, which have pledged formal support to the project.

In terms of actually meeting the mission of the group, Pollard said that true success would be in seeing strong nature and biodiversity commitments among member companies and organisations, which had been informed to some extent by engagement with the forum.

He added however, that this would be difficult to tangibly discern, given that biodiversity is increasingly becoming a “hot topic” in the private sector, particularly in the wake of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) agreement signed last December at the UN COP15 nature summit in Montreal.

As a next step towards meeting the overall goal of the UKBBF, there will be a series of workshops and webinars throughout 2023.

These will focus on topics such as the meaning of the business-focused Target 15 of the GBF for UK companies, the formal launch of the forum’s new Nature Positive Business Pledge, and deciphering the impact of the imminent final TNFD recommendations.

UK IN FOCUS

The UKBBF unsurprisingly focuses on Britain-headquartered companies, and the country seems to be trying to situate itself as one of the leading nations among rich countries to act on biodiversity and nature policy and finance.

A recent announcement alongside France which sets out a roadmap for delivering a global biodiversity crediting market has been broadly welcomed by stakeholders.

Pollard also noted that on private sector activity in particular, the country was making strong progress.

“There’s definitely a core expertise and drive for business action from people in the UK,” he said.

“The intent and potential interest in the TNFD from the UK-based financial sector is really interesting and really leading. I’m not aware of similar levels of interest from US-registered companies, for example.”

He pointed to European countries such as France and the Netherlands as also having established strong bodies and legal frameworks for biodiversity protection, which places them among the leading examples across developed economies.

The EU Business & Biodiversity Platform offers a similar service for firms based within the bloc and is a supporter of the UKBBF.

By Roy Manuell – roy@carbon-pulse.com

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