Nature is becoming the new locus for corporate climate change action. This week, representatives from 196 countries, alongside corporations, standard-setters and NGOs, meet in Cali, Colombia, for COP16. Where climate COP has the Paris agreement – that now-outdated 1.5°C lodestone for global climate action – nature and biodiversity COPs work towards advancing the Kunming-Montreal agreement, a set of nature-based targets to limit global damage over the next 10 years. While governments work on the global stage, hashing out agreements and financing, what is the corporate world up to?
Decarbonization targets have so far drawn on marketing-friendly concepts – most famously incorporating terms such as ‘climate neutral’ and ‘net zero’. For businesses, the emerging target is now described as ‘nature positivity’. This is widely understood to mean contributing to an increase in ‘natural assets’ – that is, biodiversity. Nature and carbon have a synergistic relationship: climate change drives habitat loss, and vice versa. It follows that organizations should align emerging nature strategies – supported by frameworks developed by the SBTN and TNFD, amongst others – with their decarbonization plans. But is this feasible?
Quantifying biodiversity impact is extremely challenging, and highly ecosystem-dependent. Biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest, for example, is far higher than in a pristine desert environment – but both must be conserved. In the short term, organizations may look to support nature strategies through the voluntary carbon offsets market, purchasing nature-based avoidance credits to theoretically preserve ecosystems. Buyers may therefore benefit from both carbon and nature claims-making.
We are still in the early days of corporate nature strategies, and ultimately, of target-setting and transition planning. Despite a recent proliferation of digital technologies – such as Nala and Nature Metrics – and big hype in the consulting space, the future of nature strategies is unclear. A cynic might brand this new nature focus as a ‘shiny toy’ for organizations looking to differentiate their climate strategies from the competition – and draw attention away from potentially stalled decarbonization progress. Executives should watch the nature space with interest. Without clear guidelines or best practices, however, now is not the time to invest.
