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Brain Circuits
Biodiversity matters to business: What’s to be done now
Companies should aspire to restore and renew biodiversity as an investment in the future. Here are five actions for a more sustainable business agenda.
Biodiversity loss is as much an existential threat as climate change, with significant impacts on the economy and business. We have already lost 69% of species in the past 50 years, and one million more are threatened with extinction. Every year, we only replace half of the forests we cut down. Over a third of our fish stocks are being over-fished. By 2050, we will have more plastic than fish in the ocean.
Ecosystem services — the services provided by nature — are essential to our economy, contributing to over half of global GDP, or $44tn every year. Consider nature’s direct contributions and what’s at stake if something happens:
- Three-quarters of our critical food crops, worth between $235-577bn, depend on animal pollination.
- Overfishing threatens food supplies (158 million tons in 2019) and the jobs of the 59.5 million people globally employed as fishers or fish farmers.
- Half of all approved modern drugs were developed from wild species, and 85 of the 175 small molecules used to fight cancer are either natural or derived from wild species.
Already, governments and regulators have begun to take notice and legislate. Businesses can show leadership on this emerging political agenda by:
Embedding biodiversity in climate strategies: This makes for more effective and long-lasting carbon reductions.
Focusing on a “nature-positive” strategy: It is not enough to be neutral or net zero; businesses should aspire to restore and renew biodiversity as an investment in the future.
Investing in measuring the company’s impact on biodiversity: across operations and supply chains. Expertise can be outsourced, but “nature- positive” teams should have the resources to measure baselines and progress.
Setting concrete targets: This will be an iterative process, and the earlier companies engage, the more influential they will be in shaping future standards.
Testing and learning from experimental projects: like voluntary biodiversity credits, and new monitoring technologies such as environmental DNA (eDNA), passive acoustic monitoring (ecoacoustics), and artificial intelligence (AI).
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Further reading:
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
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