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THREE KEY LEARNINGS FROM OUR UNDERSTANDING BIODIVERSITY WEBINAR
October, 2021
Biodiversity will become a core issue in the boardrooms of luxury businesses in 2022. Governments and investors are calling for companies to move from destroying the variety of life on earth – biodiversity – to contributing to its restoration. In this webinar, Positive Luxury CEO Diana Verde Nieto, Kristin Rechberger, CEO of Dynamic Planet, Mark Gough, CEO of the Capitals Coalition, and Annelisa Grigg, Director and Sustainability Advisor at Globalbalance explored exactly what biodiversity is, why it is a reputational risk, and what businesses can do to preserve biodiversity in their supply chain. The webinar can be watched in full, and we have broken down the main points of interest in an executive summary below. Positive Luxury’s Understanding Biodiversity report, co-created with Globalbalance, can be downloaded here.
Understanding the difference between biodiversity and nature
To begin the webinar, Annelisa Grigg started by explaining the difference between biodiversity and nature and why that is important to luxury businesses. Nature is all the processes and things on the planet that we don’t necessarily create. Linked to that is the concept of natural capital, which is the resources that businesses are dependent on to create things. Almost all luxury businesses are reliant on natural capital, from drinks businesses that are reliant on their local water supply, to fashion brands using materials harvested from a forest. This is separate to biodiversity which, in its simplest terms, is the variety of life on earth. Biodiversity is an insurance policy for humanity that ensures that we have access to natural capital in the future because it is what maintains those systems. It ensures the resilience of natural systems and ensures we can derive ‘ecosystem services’. To explain this, Annelisa used the example of pollination as a ‘service’ nature provides us. Midges, for example, pollinate coco plants in some parts of the world. If that midge were to go extinct then we would lose the ability to pollinate coco plants in that area. This, in turn, would cut off our access to chocolate.
Biodiversity and risk
Mark Gough, CEO of the Capitals Coalition, was involved in some of the work developing our current understanding of biodiversity and explained that when that work was being done, the expectation was that reputational risk would be what the key driver for businesses to act. Instead, he has found that action is instead being driven by businesses discovering their dependencies and reliance on nature and identifying that as a risk to their future. However, legislative risk is now on the rise. The G7 announcements from earlier this year made it clear that the ‘economics of nature’ were now central to how governments were starting to view sustainability and the Nature Positive Global Goal is also raising the expected standards for businesses. Another risk is that biodiversity is now being built into disclosure standards for businesses. That is as a result of biodiversity becoming central to understanding how business works – as purpose becomes increasingly central to businesses, so does taking biodiversity seriously. Mark also suggested that brands should prepare for ‘Align’, a project funded by the European commission that is starting to develop standardised recommendations for Biodiversity, noting: ‘if you’re not taking account of those things, you will be left behind’.
30 by 30
Kristin Rechberger, CEO, Dynamic Planet recommends that consumers and brands looking for hope around the topic of biodiversity explore the 30by30 initiative. A campaign that is working with high-level government representatives from over 80 governments, it is an action coalition seeking to protect 30% of the planet by 2030. Currently, only 8% of the ocean is protected and only 17% of the land. Kristine pointed to the gap between the erosion of nature and how much we currently consume to drive home the urgency of this mission. It is essential that brands, consumers, and governments work together to close that gap if we are going to preserve biodiversity.
Download Understanding Biodiversity: Luxury as a force for nature here
