Moving beyond rhetoric: to build a nature-positive economy, focus on nature-supportive action

In brief:

• The notion of nature positive is gaining traction, with more companies making net-positive claims.
• But it’s virtually impossible for any company to be nature positive on its own. With a lack of definition, guidance and ways to measure nature impacts, claims are increasingly misleading.
• Businesses might not ever become nature-positive entities. But they do have an opportunity to contribute to a nature-positive world by adopting specific actions and nature-supportive pathways that align with the mitigation hierarchy avoid-reduce-restore-transform.
• This requires working collaboratively with other actors to tackle the full scope of nature (not just climate).
• It also means transforming production processes or business models to decouple business activity from natural resource use.
• Firms should also transparently communicate their nature-supportive targets and actions, progress to date, and the challenges preventing them going further.

Everybody’s talking about becoming nature positive. The race is on to reverse global biodiversity loss and address environmental degradation. Right now, we’re overusing our planet’s resources by at least 75%. Wildlife populations have declined by almost 70% in the last 50 years, and our natural ecosystems have declined by 47% on average.

The vision for nature positive is clear: We must create a world where the future state of nature — including biodiversity, ecosystem services and natural capital — is greater than the current state.

Many companies have responded to the challenge by making commitments to become nature positive. There are now 126 signatories to the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge, all committing to set targets to address their impacts on nature. At COP26, almost 100 companies promised to halt and reverse the decline of nature by 2030.

Such moves have been widely heralded by political and business leaders these past two years, with the G7 declaring our world should become not only net zero emissions, but also nature positive. The most recent World Economic Forum in Davos devoted an entire session to driving towards a “nature-positive economy”. The European Commission says it wants to be a pioneer of nature positive action. Its proposed Nature Restoration Law promises to be a key step in avoiding ecosystem collapse and preventing the worst impacts of biodiversity loss. 

A net zero for biodiversity

For campaign groups, establishing an overall goal for companies to tackle the decline in nature has been a real focus. As Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, admits, coming up with a goal for nature that is equivalent to net zero emissions has been an “obsession.”

Globally, policymakers have been trying to keep pace, with the Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted after lengthy negotiations at the COP15 meeting largely seen as a milestone, Paris-Agreement-style moment. It includes two 30×30 targets for the world’s countries to put in place protective measures to safeguard 30% of land, 30% of inland waters and 30% of seas by 2030, and restoring 30% of degraded freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecosystems by 2030. Crucially, companies and investors will have to report and monitor their relationship, impact and dependencies on biodiversity and nature.

Meanwhile, corporates are looking to frameworks offered by the likes of the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosure to guide their actions and decisions on addressing biodiversity loss. SBTN has identified interim targets that companies can set today and introduced an Action Framework (AR3T): Avoid, Reduce, Regenerate, Restore and Transform, based on the well-known mitigation and conservation hierarchies, to help companies plan for and address their impacts on biodiversity. It’s currently developing methods to set targets on all aspects of the environment, with methodologies for setting freshwater and land targets expected in 2023. In 2023, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) is also set to expand its focus to include corporate biodiversity reporting.

Lack of definition and guidance

However, despite the potential for nature-positive goals to truly mobilize businesses and galvanize action, it’s a concept that still lacks clear definitions, making it hard to interpret. The rules on how to operationalise and deliver nature positivity in practice also remain ambiguous. 

Work continues to develop clarity and definition, but it’s clear there is a long way to go. According to research, while reversing biodiversity loss and moving towards nature recovery and regeneration is included in most definitions used by organizations, nature positive is defined in different ways. However, there’s general consensus that nature positive starts with the mitigation hierarchy avoid-reduce-restore/regenerate.

Yet the lack of a standard (and widely understood) definition means corporate claims of being, or becoming, nature positive can be very misleading, and the term is at risk of becoming meaningless and open to accusations of greenwashing.

A review of 400 global businesses by the World Benchmarking Alliance found that just 5% of them have an understanding of their true impact on nature. Another study, by the UN Environment Programme, highlights the huge funding gap that must be filled if companies are to seriously address biodiversity loss. The organization suggests that funding for nature should increase to US$384B a year by 2025 — more than double the current spend.

According to Professor Jan Bebbington, Director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business at Lancaster University, “many companies have made the double materiality case for why climate is important to them, [but] they have not done so for biodiversity.” 

Yes, climate change is one of the key drivers of biodiversity loss, she adds. But there are other pressures on biodiversity that companies must take into account. And if approached in a vacuum, measures to mitigate climate change may have unintended negative consequences for natural ecosystems.

The right to destroy ecosystems

There are also concerns that the notion of nature positivity will give rise to the commodification of nature, with systems of compensation set up to give license to companies to destroy ecosystems in some regions but not in others. To address climate change, carbon markets have largely failed us by perpetuating the right to pollute. Applying a similar model to protect nature will result in a similar issue. But unlike greenhouse gas emissions, which can be measured using simple metrics (CO2 equivalents), nature positivity is based on an illusion of substitutivity — for example, one forest could replace another. What’s more, nature-related challenges are highly localized, meaning any compensation would need to take place within the locality where the damage occurred or a similar ecosystem and have a reasonable chance of long-term success (and meet other criteria outlined by the OP2B’s Framework for Restoration Actions). 

Also, while achieving a nature-positive state implies ‘more nature,’ it doesn’t say much about the quality of biodiversity, and generally ignores the complexity of ecosystems and the way they function. This raises numerous questions, not least, how much more nature is needed to achieve a ‘positive’ status? How much nature will contribute to restoration or regeneration? The science isn’t yet ready to make such measurements, and there is no common unit to measure biodiversity or a common understanding of how that might work.

Business can contribute to a nature-positive world

Becoming nature positive at a company level — and taking into account the full value chain and the full scope of nature — is almost impossible. That’s because tackling biodiversity and ecosystem loss is a collective endeavor that goes beyond simply planting wildflower meadows or offering vegetarian menus as a default. It requires complex, systemic change at scale.

Therefore, making nature positive claims or statements that can’t be evidenced should be avoided. Companies need to consider carefully what they can, and cannot, legitimately claim in relation to being nature positive. 

Rather than claiming to be nature positive, focus instead on action — how you’re contributing to a nature-positive world by sharing the specific actions and nature-supportive pathways you have adopted to avoid and reduce impacts on nature, then to restore and regenerate nature and reverse the loss of biodiversity.

Becoming a nature-supportive business means applying ambitious, science-based and integrated action, both immediately and long-term. For those of you that haven’t done so, adopt nature-supportive pathways to create a single, common, unified goal for addressing nature as a company. This requires:

• Working collaboratively with other actors, across your value chain, within your sector and beyond 
• Tackling the full scope of nature (not just climate) and covering the full scope of material impacts
• Better aligning your nature and climate actions to benefit from any synergies and avoid taking climate action that may actually harm nature (e.g., deforesting land for solar farms or switching to or producing biofuels, which have implications for land use, water resources and air quality)
• Transforming your production processes or business models to decouple business growth from resource consumption
• Avoiding new negative impacts
• Reducing ongoing impacts
• restoring what is being destroyed by your company
• Complementing these actions with additional conservation and restoration measures
• Introducing specific interim 2030 targets to create clarity on level of ambition and action required
• Transparently communicating about your baseline, targets and actions, progress to date, and the challenges preventing you from going further. Make sure your communication is specific (highlighting the hotspots you’re referring to), measurable (substantiating it with scientific data), relevant (focusing on impact areas that matter) and understandable (and easy to digest for consumers). 

While businesses might not ever become nature-positive entities, they do have a real opportunity to contribute to a nature-positive world, one that is more regenerative and more restorative, and build resilience in their operations and supply chains for the long term.

+ Alain Vidal, PhD | Senior Advisor, Biodiversity + Regenerative Agriculture