ACT-D: High Level Business Actions on Nature

1. Make commitments. Make meaningful, informed, and public commitments through credible platforms. Work to reduce your most significant and material business impacts and dependencies on nature while building environmental management and performance into your corporate governance. Use Business for Nature’s commitment list to locate relevant commitments and connect your company’s efforts to collective global action. Monitor, report and improve on progress towards commitments and targets, and use best practice ESG (Environment Social and Governance) metrics, making sure to incorporate relevant contextual information (such as the population density where air pollution occurs).

2. Set targets. Measure your baseline impacts and set measurable targets across priority locations for how much you will contribute to reduce your impact and contribute positively by restoring ecosystems, including land, freshwater, and oceans. Ensure that targets are based on science, and reflect priority impacts and dependencies for your company, your region, and the planet. Take inspiration from the Science-Based Targets for Nature (SBTN) initial guidance and their suggested interim targets, and prepare to set targets in line with the final guidance to be released in 2023. Depending on your company’s material impacts, you should set initial targets using, for example, the Accountability Framework Initiative and this guide to setting water targets.  For most companies, setting science-based targets for climate (through SBTi) is one of the best things you can do today in order to get ready to set SBTs for nature, and  start contributing towards reducing the  pressures  fueling nature loss. Be as ambitious as possible and aim to achieve nature-positivity – alongside carbon neutrality – across your operations by 2030. Monitor, report and improve on progress towards commitments and targets.

Contribute to systems transformation: avoid and reduce negative impacts, restore and regenerate, shift business strategy and models, and advocate for policy ambition.

1. Avoid and reduce. Prevent impacts from happening in the first place or eliminate the impact entirely. Do as much as possible to minimize impacts across your value chain when elimination is not possible.

• Stop any damage in priority areas to have “zero harm” on biodiversity and nature, such as the Amazon rainforests and coral reefs, while simultaneously acting to draw down impacts across less-threatened landscapes and ecosystems. If you are aware of certain practices that harm biodiversity – e.g., the application of fertilizers and pesticides, use of ghost nets and bottom trawls, take immediate action to change them, even if you don’t yet have perfect information.

• While it is critical to address material impacts as soon as possible at landscape or seascape-level, many companies start by taking simple first steps to motivate employees and lay the groundwork for further action. While more strategic decisions are discussed and made, in parallel you can start by making meaningful gestures such as switching to renewable energy sources, increasing water use efficiency, removing single-use plastics from the office, recycling waste, planting native and pollinator-friendly species, and installing nesting boxes for birds and bees in areas around your operations. However, be sure that these first steps lead to widespread action to address the most material impacts and dependencies across your value chain.

2. Regenerate and restore. Actively work in collaboration with others within your operations and across value chains to restore ecosystems, including forests, soils, freshwater systems, and marine environments. Invest in nature-based, inclusive, and holistic solutions, which also capture carbon and improve livelihoods. The NBS benefits explorer is a great starting tool for companies who want to invest in nature-based solutions. Adopt best practices in context-based and collective stewardship by understanding local risks and opportunities and working with other local natural resource users (e.g., freshwater users in a landscape) and local authorities.

• Follow the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions which is a widely accepted reference that ensures a holistic approach is taken when using nature-based solutions for nature (including biodiversity, water), climate (including carbon sequestration and climate adaptation) and people (including livelihoods and community well-being).

3. Shift business strategy and models. Adapt your company strategy and business model to be “net-positive,” to “give back more than you take” to restore ecosystems with collective measurable, reported and verified positive impacts, while also ensuring your negative impact footprint is as low as possible. Embed nature at the core of your business: ensure that the value of biodiversity and climate impacts are weighed in critical decisions.  Invest in transformational innovations and circular business models and products, such as buildings that absorb and break down pollutants. Engage in landscape-level and jurisdictional approaches for collaborative action to reduce impacts like deforestation and produce positive changes through contextually appropriate investments in nature-based solutions. Divest from assets – including in your pension plans – that degrade and over-exploit nature and redirect resources towards sustainable use, resilience, restoration, and circularity.

• Encourage further business action – and thus the transformation of global economies – by making your methods and data open-source and sharing your successes and challenges with companies that are starting their journey. Elevate the World Economic Forum’s 15 nature-positive transitions which could generate up to US$10.1 trillion in annual business value and create 395 million jobs by 2030.

4. Collaborate with your value chains at the landscape-level.  Act systematically to apply the mitigation hierarchy beyond operations and engage with key stakeholders, including those in your corporate value chain, in the landscapes and seascapes where you operate or source, and in your sector. Downstream companies, (those closer to consumers), should engage and support companies further upstream in their supply chains (those closer to raw extraction and production) to adopt lower impact practices, improve data collection abilities, and increase overall supply chain transparency.

5. Advocate for ambitious government policies that will scale and speed up further positive business action.

• Sign up to the “Nature is Everyone’s Business” Call to Action, and support the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature.

• Call on governments to adopt policies which create a stable operating environment and level playing field for business and contribute to key negotiations for nature. At the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) COP15 negotiations world leaders have a unique opportunity to adopt a transformative international agreement on nature (the nature equivalent of the Paris Agreement on climate).

• Support specific business advocacy initiatives that contribute to reversing the loss of nature, e.g., business manifesto calling for a UN treaty on plastic pollution.