The Assessment will highlight the crucial role that many different actors; governments, businesses, financial institutions, and others, play in creating the right conditions for change. When these groups work together, they can drive stronger policies, smarter decision-making, and real progress for biodiversity.
Key insights from the report
The key takeaways include:
- Businesses both depend on and impact biodiversity, giving them a critical role -and responsibility - in driving positive change.
- To achieve a just and sustainable future, businesses need supportive external conditions, stronger knowledge bases and better integration of science, Indigenous and local knowledge.
- Effective action requires collaboration at all levels, guided by fit-for-purpose methods that vary by sector and should be assessed for coverage, accuracy and responsiveness.
- Creating an enabling environment benefits businesses, biodiversity and people, helping to scale meaningful action on impacts and dependencies.
The paper notes that the understanding of business dependencies and impacts on nature remain incomplete and uneven. It makes the vital link to impacts on human health and wellbeing, Indigenous People and local communities and to consumer preferences and business behaviour.
The document identifies the opportunity for governments to collect and make available biodiversity data (something ISEP have been calling for). It emphasises the need for collaboration between governments, financial actors and businesses, and the need for relevant, enabling policies, laws and regulations. The paper highlights the need for capacity and knowledge, enabling action across the value chain, and the need for financial institutions to pivot away from harmful activities toward positive biodiversity impacts.
There is a large section on the methodologies that are used to measure business impacts and dependencies on biodiversity. It emphasises that no single approach works for all types of impacts, sectors or locations. Instead, methods need to be chosen carefully to ensure they are fit for purpose. In short, the right method must match the specific goal and the level at which decisions are being made. Although there is enough actionable guidance for businesses on their impacts and dependencies on biodiversity, this is not the case for their impacts on people.
Conclusion
It looks like the full Assessment paper will be a meaty document full of information, tables, figures – very much a synthesis of scientific information currently available. Aimed at policy and decision makers, it should be a great ‘how to’ and could be inspirational for business leaders and sustainability professionals.
What is going to be unique about both the Summary for Policy Makers and the full Assessment report -and differs from other business and biodiversity documents already available - is that it’s been written and agreed by experts representing governments across the globe.
What next? We shall have to wait to see how governments, businesses, and decision makers react. Much of the content reflects the UN Global Biodiversity Framework’s 23 Targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and so it will be interesting to follow developments in the run up to Biodiversity COP 17 in October this year.
The full Report (including all data) will be published once the necessary edits, following the IPBES meeting in Manchester, have been finalised – most likely in a few months.
