‘Nature positive’ status is emerging as a central ESG target for many businesses worldwide, but they could face greenwashing risks unless they implement a number of best practices, a BP official said Wednesday.
“There’s a risk of unintentional greenwashing because companies don’t understand what nature positive is and what the expectations are on businesses,” said Mark Johnston, strategy lead for biodiversity and nature-based solutions at BP.
Johnston contributed to the “Nature-Positive for business: Developing a common approach” technical paper, released at the end of last year by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in an attempt to underpin corporate efforts in delivering nature positive outcomes.
The paper was authored by the Impact Mitigation and Ecological Compensation (IMEC) working group, part of the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management and comprised of over 70 experts, including Johnston, spanning academia, business, and NGOs.
“The purpose of our work was to contribute to understanding what nature positive means for businesses in the process of developing a common approach,” Johnston told an IUCN webinar Wednesday.
“What businesses need is clarity about the concept itself and how they can contribute to authentic positive.”
Since biodiversity loss has moved up the ESG and political agenda, experts have struggled with ongoing questions of complexity, with the term ‘nature positive’ mooted to take on the politically salient role that ‘net zero’ has played for climate action. The Nature Positive Initiative banded to define the term last September.
The IMEC working group identified 10 core principles which should inform corporate actions towards the nature positive goal:
- Adopt targets covering all realms of nature
- Apply the mitigation hierarchy
- Adopt a holistic approach encompassing up- and downstream impacts and dependencies
- Align with global goals
- Integrate nature into the decision-making processes
- Engage with stakeholders across landscapes, sectors, and value chains
- Apply monitoring of the state and pressure on nature with a clear process for triggering adaptive management responses
- Be transparent about commitments and targets
- Engage with Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs)
- Adopt demonstrable measurement and accounting of losses and gains
CONTRIBUTING TO NBSAPS
“There’s lots of interest from businesses. They really want to know how they can look beyond business as usual and understand what’s their role to play in achieving global goals and supporting the nature of recovery,” said Stacey Baggaley, nature and business principal specialist at UNEP-WCMC, who co-authored the paper.
“However, these principles are quite difficult to implement. A lot of businesses aren’t going to be at this stage yet,” she said during the webinar.
As a first step, companies should therefore undertake an analysis to understand which principles are most relevant to their organisation and which gaps need to be urgently addressed, she said.
Baggaley also called on companies to support countries in updating their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) as they look to implement the targets outlined in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
“We need to think about how companies can engage in those processes, how they can understand what’s really important at the national level both in terms of where they operate and where their supply chains are,” she said.
Countries are required to update their NBSAPs before the COP16 UN biodiversity summit, which will take place in Colombia from Oct. 21 to Nov. 1, outlining how they plan to achieve the GBF targets.
China’s State council approved its NBSAP last week, confirming its commitment to the GBF target to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030.
The EU, France, Luxembourg, Hungary, Japan, and Spain have already submitted their NBSAPs to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
By Sergio Colombo – sergio@carbon-pulse.com
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