New campaign launched to enhance credibility of corporate biodiversity strategies

Image: Morgan Sindall Construction. Pictured: GSK's Carbon Neutral Laboratory for Sustainable Chemistry, Nottingham, UK.

Business for Nature has today (22 May) launched a new platform to support businesses and financial institutions in developing credible nature strategies, with ambitious targets and water-tight plans to achieve them without greenwashing.

Forming part of the ‘It’s Now For Nature’ campaign, the platform will feature businesses whose strategies align with the principles set out in Business for Nature’s Nature Strategy Handbook.

The principles include:

• Senior management’s approval of the strategy and responsibility for its delivery
• Inclusion of a materiality assessment on nature-related impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities
• Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) targets
• Credible action plans to achieve these SMART targets

A growing trend

Business for Nature has reviewed the biodiversity strategies of several companies and deemed five firms to be in alignment with these principles so far. They are GSK, Kering, the Taiwan Cement Corporation, utility multinational ENGIE and Oxford-based hairdresser Anne Veck.

GSK updated its nature pathway plan in March as it strives to become a nature-positive business. The plan sets out priority actions to improve sustainable sourcing practices, reduce water use, enhance water stewardship and cut emissions.

GSK is set to be an early adopter of sustainability reporting aligned with the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework. This framework exists to enhance business’s measurements of their nature-related risks and to help firms combine financial and nature reporting.

Kering, meanwhile, updated its biodiversity strategy last summer after producing an initial iteration in 2020. It includes headline ambitions to end deforestation and land conversion in supply chains by 2025, and to regenerate and protect and area around six times as large as the business’s total land footprint within the same timeframe.

Kering’s sustainability programme director Geraldine Vallejo said she hopes Business for Nature’s campaign “will contribute to the growing momentum of corporate nature action, encouraging more companies to develop and publish an ambitious strategy for a nature-positive future”.

The news comes ahead of the first UN biodiversity summit since nations ratified a new global treaty for the 2020s. World leaders, nature experts and business representatives will be among the thousands of attendees of the 16^th UN Biodiversity COP in Colombia this October.

Business for Nature would like more firms to “send a strong signal” ahead of the summit, encouraging other firms to prepare to play their part in the delivery of the treaty. It has a headline ambition of halting nature loss this decade and restoring nature at scale through to 2050.