At COP15, businesses urged to act for nature

MONTREAL – Widely blamed for ravaging Earth’s ecosystems, big businesses are nevertheless being turned to as key players in a deal to save nature at the United Nations COP15 biodiversity conference in Canada.

With hundreds of billions of dollars needed for the task, public funds can only fill part of the gap. Campaigners and experts at the talks are demanding companies act to reduce their impact – and firms in turn are asking for clear rules of engagement.

Ministers at the meeting in Montreal are thrashing out a global agreement for this decade to curb damage to Earth’s forests, oceans and species – with conservation and finance top of the agenda.

“One of the other things at stake in this COP is getting businesses involved,” said Pierre Cannet of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, on the sidelines of the talks.

“Whatever the outcome of the summit, they will have to ask themselves how they can curb the fall in biodiversity?”

Elizabeth Mrema, the head of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity that underpins COP15, said a record number of private-sector parties registered for this year’s summit, where delegates are working on a new Global Biodiversity Framework.

“Clearly they’ve listened,” she told Agence France-Presse.

“They have understood or they are getting there now, understanding also the impact of their operations on nature, the nature biodiversity which we all depend on and (they) also depend (on) for their businesses,” she added.

“If they are not part of the framework, their businesses will also suffer.”

Invest in nature

Some US$900 billion (S$1.22 trillion) a year is needed to move from “an economy that devours nature to a neutral and then a positive economy,” says Gilles Kleitz of the French state development agency AFD.

For this, “the role of businesses is fundamental”, said Didier Babin, a researcher at Cirad, an institute that focuses on sustainable agriculture.

“More businesses have to be brought on board” to help fund the targets, he added. “They depend on biodiversity and they must invest more in the capital of nature. Nature needs to be thought of as an asset.”

One of the targets in the framework under discussion at COP15 is a section aimed at obliging big companies and financial groups to measure and publish their impacts on the natural world and their exposure to it.

The World Economic Forum said in a 2020 report that more than half of global production depends heavily (15 per cent) or moderately (37 per cent) on nature and services related to it.

It calculated the value of businesses’ exposure to degraded ecosystems at US$44 trillion.

The report found that the construction sector was the most exposed with US$4 trillion, followed by agriculture with US$2.5 trillion and the food and drink industry with US$1.4 trillion.