A campaign to encourage businesses and financial institutions worldwide to submit nature-related strategies has been announced by Business for Nature.
The ‘It’s Now for Nature’ campaign, to launch officially on Nov. 9, rallies businesses to send their “nature-positive world by 2030” plans for publishing on its online platform.
“We’re going to be launching our biggest-ever campaign that focuses on business action – where is nature in your business strategy?” said Eva Zabey, CEO of Business for Nature.
“We’re going to be launching a nature strategy handbook that we’ve been collaborating on with PricewaterhouseCoopers UK,” Zabey said during a panel at the EU Business for Nature conference in Milan.
The Business for Nature coalition has been consulting on the handbook with its network of 85 partner organisations, which include CDP, Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The handbook will include the key components of a nature strategy, based on Business for Nature’s principles of assess, commit, transform, and disclose, Zabey told Carbon Pulse on the sidelines of the conference.
The campaign will last until 2030, with a stocktake of progress to take place at the biodiversity COP next year, she said.
Some companies on the business advisory group for Business for Nature will be the first to publish their strategies, Zabey said.
Although about 1,500 corporations have signed up to Business for Nature’s Call to Action statement, “very few” are expected to have a nature strategy ready for submission.
The campaign is a “marathon rather than a sprint” that may not see large numbers of corporations submitting strategies immediately after launch, she said.
The entry point for companies to the platform will be action, rather than simply disclosure of a strategy, according to Zabey.
“The strategy needs to be publicly available as evidence of future action that the company will take.”
“It’s a little bit of a special campaign because you can’t just sign up to it. We’re not interested in commitments, in companies saying that they’re going to develop a strategy – we just want them to update their strategy. If that takes six months or six years, the entry ticket is a strategy,” stressed Zabey.
“I’m more interested in getting a few really good strategies to begin with than a whole bunch of mediocre ones. Nobody’s ever done this before. It’s quite a disruptive and innovative way of approaching collective business action on nature.”
Spurring action from companies seeking to compete with the green credentials of their rivals is among the goals of the campaign.
“It provides some consistency and continuity in what our community is asking of business. Businesses are getting tired of always signing up to different things, but if you have a nature strategy you can answer all of the questions [from different initiatives].”
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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