Using conservation science to advance corporate biodiversity accountability

Biodiversity declines threaten the sustainability of global economies and societies. Acknowledging this, businesses are beginning to make commitments to account for and mitigate their influence on biodiversity, and report this in sustainability reports. The top 100 of the 2016 Fortune 500 Global companies' (the Fortune 100) sustainability reports were assessed to gauge the current state of corporate biodiversity accountability. Many companies acknowledged biodiversity, but corporate biodiversity accountability is in its infancy. Almost half (49) of the Fortune 100 mentioned biodiversity in reports, and 31 made clear biodiversity commitments, of which only 5 could be considered specific, measureable and time?bound. A variety of biodiversity?related activities were disclosed (e.g., managing impacts, restoring biodiversity, and investing in biodiversity), but only 9 companies provided quantitative indicators to verify the magnitude of their activities (e.g., area of habitat restored). No companies reported quantitative biodiversity outcomes, making it difficult to determine whether business actions were of sufficient magnitude to address impacts, and are achieving positive outcomes for nature. Conservation science can help advance approaches to corporate biodiversity accountability through developing science?based biodiversity commitments, meaningful indicators, and more targeted activities to address business impacts. With the “biodiversity policy super?year” of 2020 rapidly approaching, now is the time for conservation scientists to engage with and support businesses to play a critical role in setting the new agenda for a sustainable future for the planet, with biodiversity at its heart

Biodiversity means business: Reframing global biodiversity goals for the private sector

The Convention on Biological Diversity strategic goals direct the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity from global to local scales. Yet business’ role in meeting the strategic goals and being accountable for their impacts and dependencies on biodiversity are still not fully and coherently outlined. We demonstrate how business actions can contribute to the strategic goals using 10 publicly available case studies, covering businesses of various sizes, from multiple sectors, operating in different contexts. The case studies show some businesses already contribute to meeting biodiversity goals, often without realizing. We consider the drivers of business engagement with biodiversity; problems in interpreting the scale of impacts through corporate reporting; the implications for changing the way businesses engage with biodiversity goals; and how businesses could contribute more under the post‐2020 framework for biodiversity. We call for increased business accountability for nature and that all in conservation—policymakers, practitioners, researchers, communities—do more to connect businesses with the strategic goals. Clearer business roles and responsibilities within international targets form a critical step toward the fundamental systems‐level change required to reverse biodiversity loss

Developing a nature recovery network using systematic conservation planning

Conservation area networks in most countries are fragmented and inadequate. To tackle this in England, government policies are encouraging stakeholders to create local-level nature recovery networks. Here, we describe work led by a wildlife organization that used the systematic conservation planning approach to identify a nature recovery network for three English counties and select focal areas within it where they will focus their work. The network was based on identifying core zones to maintain current biodiversity and recovery zones for habitat restoration, meeting area-based targets for 50 priority habitat, landscape, landcover, and ecosystem service types. It included the existing designated sites for conservation, which cover 6.05% of the study site, and identified an additional 11.6% of land as core zones and 18% as recovery zones, reflecting the organization's call for 30% of England to be conserved and connected by 2030. We found that systematic conservation planning worked well in this context, identifying a connected, adequate, representative, and efficient network and producing transparent and repeatable results. The analysis also highlighted the pressing need for government agencies to provide national-level guidance and datasets for setting targets and including species data in spatial planning, creating a national framework to inform local action

Net positive outcomes for nature

Much research and policy effort is being expended on seeking ways to conserve living nature while enabling the economic and social development needed to increase global equity and end poverty. We propose that this will only be possible if the language of policy shifts away from setting conservation targets that focus on avoiding losses and towards developing processes that consider net outcomes for biodiversity

Bringing sustainability to life: A framework to guide biodiversity indicator development for business performance management

Biodiversity loss is a critical sustainability issue, and companies are beginning to seek ways to assess their biodiversity performance. Initiatives to date have developed biodiversity indicators for specific business contexts (e.g., spatial scales – from site, to product, to regional, or corporate scales), however many are not widely translatable across different contexts making it challenging for businesses seeking indicators to manage their biodiversity performance. By synthesizing the steps of common conservation and business decision-making systems, we propose a framework to support more comprehensive development of quantitative biodiversity indicators, for a range of business contexts. The framework integrates experience from existing tried-and-tested conservation frameworks. We illustrate how our framework offers a pathway for businesses to assess their biodiversity performance, and demonstrate responsible management by mitigating and reversing their biodiversity impacts and sustaining their dependencies, enabling them to demonstrate their contribution to emerging global biodiversity targets (e.g., Convention on Biological Diversity post-2020 targets)

A Global Mitigation Hierarchy for Nature Conservation

Efforts to conserve biodiversity comprise a patchwork of international goals, national-level plans, and local interventions that, overall, are failing. We discuss the potential utility of applying the mitigation hierarchy, widely used during economic development activities, to all negative human impacts on biodiversity. Evaluating all biodiversity losses and gains through the mitigation hierarchy could help prioritize consideration of conservation goals and drive the empirical evaluation of conservation investments through the explicit consideration of counterfactual trends and ecosystem dynamics across scales. We explore the challenges in using this framework to achieve global conservation goals, including operationalization and monitoring and compliance, and we discuss solutions and research priorities. The mitigation hierarchy's conceptual power and ability to clarify thinking could provide the step change needed to integrate the multiple elements of conservation goals and interventions in order to achieve successful biodiversity outcomes

Four steps for the Earth: mainstreaming the post-2020 global biodiversity framework

The upcoming Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting, and adoption of the new Global Biodiversity Framework, represent an opportunity to transform humanity's relationship with nature. Restoring nature while meeting human needs requires a bold vision, including mainstreaming biodiversity conservation in society. We present a framework that could support this: the Mitigation and Conservation Hierarchy. This places the Mitigation Hierarchy for mitigating and compensating the biodiversity impacts of developments (1, avoid; 2, minimize; 3, restore; and 4, offset, toward a target such as "no net loss" of biodiversity) within a broader framing encompassing all conservation actions. We illustrate its application by national governments, sub-national levels (specifically the city of London, a fishery, and Indigenous groups), companies, and individuals. The Mitigation and Conservation Hierarchy supports the choice of actions to conserve and restore nature, and evaluation of the effectiveness of those actions, across sectors and scales. It can guide actions toward a sustainable future for people and nature, supporting the CBD's vision

Short‐term solutions to biodiversity conservation in portfolio construction: Forward‐looking disclosure and classification‐based metrics biodiversity conservation in portfolio construction

Demand is increasing among investors to create portfolios that encourage positive outcomes for biological diversity. The evolution of investment strategies for transitions to zero carbon over the last two decades provides insights that will assist in shaping strategies for biodiversity‐positive investments. Many emerging approaches to capture company impact and dependence on biodiversity focus on nature‐related threats to an organisation by assessing ecosystem integrity. Other approaches focus on minimising an organisation's contribution to risks of species extinction by using data sets such as the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species. However, while these approaches are useful for assessing threats to and from biodiversity for individual companies, to be effective for investment portfolio construction, metrics need to be comparable across companies in an investment universe. Many of the threat assessments that could link corporate activities to impacts are incomplete and omit critical information. If the investment community focuses on biodiversity without sufficient forethought, there is a risk of entrenching metrics with significant flaws. In this paper, we suggest that interim approaches are needed to support investors in understanding the approaches being taken by potential investee companies. To that end, we present and discuss a disclosure‐based Biodiversity Management Quality and a classification‐based Biodiversity Revenues metric for biodiversity‐related investing